Mobile Elites: Bulgarian Emigrants in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century and the Accommodation of Difference in the Balkans

Ana-Teodora Kurkina

Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien, Universität Regensburg

This article addresses the issue of accommodating difference through an analysis of a specific group of mobile public actors who can be defined as “mobile elites.” Using the Bulgarian emigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century as a typical case of an exiled elite, I link this case to other European Romantic intellectuals and sketch a grand-scale scheme of regional traffic in ideas. I suggest that emigration as such instigates the consolidation of nationalist elites. Thus, elites can be viewed as large, separate, and often mobile groups, which negotiate their respective interests and search for compromises.
I contend that mobile public actors influence the societies in which they dwell by creating sets of networks which stretch over the whole region. The notion of “mobile elites” can therefore be a helpful tool in defining emigrant intellectuals. Furthermore, the activities of these intellectuals shed light on the ways in which migrant groups seek accommodation, pursue their political aims, and attempt to find compromises which can eventually yield beneficial outcomes.

Keywords: migration, elite theory, social networking, Bulgarian nation and state-building, Georgi Rakovski, Hristo Botev, othering.

In 1877, Ivan Ivanov, the head of the “Society for the spread of education among the Bulgarians,” wrote a letter to Ivan Aksakov, a prominent Russian Slavophile, discussing the destinies of the many Bulgarian volunteers employed by the Russian Army in the Russian-Turkish war. These men were mostly young and active individuals living scattered in Romania and Serbia. Ivanov mentioned that these migrant-volunteers (around 200 people) were paid 15 rubles a day, which assured their wellbeing and covered most of their needs. Yet, these men became a highly problematic group to accommodate when they lost this income, leaving them in foreign lands without legitimate means of supporting themselves. Ivanov contended that “[m]any of them are incapable of work.”1 They were primarily “hajduks,” i.e. outlaws, and their lifestyle preferences hardly coincided with the grand-scale nation and state-building ideas cherished and preached by the mobile ideologists, who sought their cooperation.

Bulgarian vagabonds who found temporary or permanent shelter in Romania, Serbia or Russia represent a typical case of migrants who were led and coordinated by a cohort of intellectuals. The ideologists were a different type of migrants altogether: they were organizers involved in mediating relations between their compatriots, the Great Powers, and the host states in which they lived. They were emigrants, but their position was different from that of their less prominent peers in a number of subtle ways which made their voices convincing and their ideology significant to the local governments, their followers and even their opponents. Nevertheless, the reality of migration united them with a much larger mass of their misplaced compatriots.

Migration is a notion that refers to a wide array of mobile people, often ignoring the fundamental differences between various groups of individuals who are considered migrants. However, different clusters of migrants have different patterns of movement which cannot all be brought together under one umbrella term. Therefore, in this article, I explore a case of the accommodation of a foreign group by several host states. In other words, I am examining the case of an emigrant elite involved in what Joep Leerssen describes as “the cultivation of culture”2 and intellectual and artistic creativity. The issue emerges in the wake of population movements and remains vital in the process of negotiating difference in the Balkans, a region contested by the authors of multiple state-and nation-building projects during the long nineteenth century and beyond. Furthermore, the discourses initiated and perpetuated by the mobile elites persisted well beyond the nineteenth century, leaving their imprints on the ideologies, paths, and propagandistic strategies of their later adherents.

When examining the case of mobile elites, one can present them as arguably the most influential group of migrants, a group that has potential power to influence their less-engaged compatriots.3 Because of their ideological activities, the mobile elites can be regarded as a link between migrants and host states. I suggest that these elites can either facilitate or hamper the accommodation of their peers into a foreign society, while relying mostly on their vast social networking and knowledge exchange.4 I analyze the ways in which these networks function by examining the example of the Bulgarian mid-nineteenth-century emigrants in Serbia, Romania, and Russia.

Building on Bernhard Giesen’s theory regarding intellectual elites which generate national communities,5 I use a comparative approach to differentiate groups of mobile ideologists from their less involved compatriots and to investigate the potential sway of their arguments among their respective national groups. Moreover, an analysis of the writings of the mobile elites offers an opportunity to trace their interconnections and follow their state-building plans, some of which later influenced regional politics. While many projects turned out to be wildly unsuccessful, most of them had lasting consequences. Lyuben Karavelov became an apostle of Balkan federalism for the future generations of socialists from the region.6 Hristo Botev claimed the place of a national Romantic poet, whose influence on Bulgarian literature crossed over into politics. Georgi Rakovski became an ideological symbol for the future generations of the Balkan politicians, and one could list many other similar examples.7

The emigrants who left Bulgaria in the middle of the nineteenth century represent a typical case of an exiled elite that can be linked to other European nationalist intellectuals (such as the post-1849 Hungarian emigrants). They can be viewed as a large, separate, transnational group, which negotiated its national interests and searched for compromises. Although they did not necessarily contribute to the economic development of their host states, they initiated and influenced the regional traffic in ideas, promoting and cultivating their national culture and state-building aspirations.

I begin by analyzing the concept of mobile elites and examining how the multiple identities of migrants can facilitate the accommodation of their national group in a host state or influence the politics within the borders of their own country. The second section of my essay deals with the networking systems developed and sustained by the emigrants and their methods of transmitting information that influenced their societies and those of others. It also addresses the idea of a common space shared by the European Romantic elites, which enabled them to promote their state-building and nation-building ideas and defend the rights of their respective groups internationally. The final section explores the impact of the mobile elites on their peers and host-societies and examines how the extent of this impact was determined by their active networking, lack of resources, or proposed goals.

Mobile Elites and Their Troublesome Identities: Refugees, Emigrants, Exiles, and Romantic Heroes

The term “migrant” encompasses people with dramatically diverse lives, political views, and destinies. The story of the protagonists of the current article is not different. The nineteenth-century Bulgarian revolutionaries whose destinies have been thoroughly studied by researchers and iconised by their descendants comprised only a tiny share of all the Bulgarian migrants living in the Romanian cities of Brăila or Bucharest or settled in Odessa or Belgrade.8 One thinks of penniless hajduks and rich merchants when dealing with people who moved for economic or political reasons.

While most inquiries “encompass theories about the motivations for migrations, about how migration is shaped by local, regional, and international economies,”9 as well as other important interdependencies, the classification of migrants as such remains a topic only rarely addressed. And yet, in addition to the economic outcomes associated with migration, one should also address the ways in which certain groups can influence and determine how their peers and they themselves integrate into a foreign society.10 Those who form a mobile elite constitute an entirely different group within the existing community of migrants.

Although “well-integrated migrants can become ‘nearly one of us’ (but never completely so), whilst the ‘underserving’ are seen as ‘too different’, as an impediment and, indeed, at times, as a threat to a sustainable society,”11 the cases of mobile elites demonstrate another picture. Moreover, that picture is paradoxical. The protagonists of the current inquiry belonged to a group of Romanticist intellectuals, and as members of this group they shared more with one another than they did with their regular compatriots. In fact, it was the reality of political emigration that forced the nineteenth-century elites to acknowledge and later exploit regional political situations, searching for allies for themselves as individuals and for their groups.

The Bulgarian mobile elites often repeated the strategies adopted by their Polish, Hungarian, and even Romanian predecessors. The defeat of the Hungarian revolution and the fall of a short-lived Hungarian state in 1849 created a cohort of brilliantly educated individuals who chose the path of emigration.12 Pushed out of the Habsburg Empire, these individuals had to reconsider not only their relations with the former host state, but also their relations with fellow minorities and their strategies of accommodation.13 They had to become diplomats and mediators who negotiated with the elites of the states which hosted them. A complicated web of interconnections stretched from one cohort of emigrants to another. Hungarian emigrants became acquainted with the Romanian “fourty-eighters” and Polish emigrants in Paris. The Romanian exiled ideologists (including the future prime minister of the Danubian Principalities, Ion Brătianu), were later the ones to accept the Bulgarian emigrants into their state.

What unites all these outstanding individuals and their less prominent compatriots was the reality of their exile. The Polish community of outstanding “cultivators of culture” in Paris and its much less notable peers shared the same experiences, but they shared them differently. Mobile elites were a thin layer of the privileged (due to their education, social status etc.), holding power in accordance with elite theory.14 They were intellectual elites who happened to be in exile. Their social capital had greater significance than that of their regular compatriots. Most of them profited from their imperial background to some extent, preserving the connections they had gained in their respective empires (as was true in the case of Prince Adam Czartoryski, for instance). Yet they were shrewd enough to formulate their subsequent political stances in accordance with the general Romanticist trends. Their political Romanticism came from cultural Romanticism,15 which in its turn made them primarily European romanticist nationalists, whose approaches, if not possible state-building plans, did not differ significantly.

Emigrant elites, like regular migrants, use their connections as important sources of social capital consisting essentially of “social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness.”16 Yet networks often transcend the bounds of local communities,17 becoming links that bind together different ideologists, who exchange ideas and aspire to win one another’s support or debate with one another. Through networks, the elites rely on social resources that are accessible through one’s direct or indirect ties.18 While social resources exert a significant effect on the attained statuses, they can also be transferable. It is through those resources that the emigrant elites managed to become a part of a nationalist Romanticist intellectual group and simultaneously remain within their smaller community, originating among the aspiring minorities. The public sphere they addressed, however, transcended that modest group.

“Public sphere initially emerged as a powerful counterweight to traditional forms of political authority, inserting itself between the private life of the family and the arcana imperii of the early modern state apparatus,”19 so the identities of the Bulgarian mobile elites can be analyzed through that connection. They were, on the one hand, private and confined to their own circle. On the other hand, they were or aspired to be part of a larger community of European intellectuals. Since “individuals become integrated in groups through processes of recurrent social interaction and communication,”20 emigrants’ publications facilitated cooperation. However, it was effective information exchange that made the works of the public actors and their organizational and unifying abilities operational. They exchanged information and created links between their community and that of their host states.

Before the Russian-Turkish War of 1877/78, cohorts of Bulgarian revolutionaries found shelters in neighboring Serbian and Romanian lands or opted for further destinations like Russia.21 The colonies they formed became outposts, where nation-building and state-building ideas were exchanged, conceived, and promoted. In a biographical note dedicated to Georgi Sava Rakovski, an ever-roaming emigrant, a revolutionary and a notable ideologist of Bulgarian liberation, Veselin Trajkov stresses Rakovski’s unique position as a truly international revolutionary ideologist.22 Like Rakovski, who became one of the minds behind a number of Bulgarian revolutionary societies, branching out in the Balkans, notable poet Hristo Botev was also one of the emigrant ideologists involved in promoting his national cause.23 What unites these individuals, except for their causes, debated, but often shared, is their experience of migration and their elite statuses.

Ivan Vazov, acclaimed writer and an emigrant in his youth, a representative of a younger generation of the Bulgarian intellectuals, published a novel and a theatre play featuring a romanticized version of the events of his turbulent youth. As outcasts living on the banks of the Danube after the failed attempts to liberate their nation from the Ottoman Empire, the protagonists led miserable lives. In the beginning of his novel, Vazov notes, “Romania offered them hospitality, but a type of hospitality that an empty shore gives to sailors, tossed out by the storms, shattered and broken. They were in a society, yet they were in a desert.”24 Vazov’s accounts should be understood as a romanticized version of the events, much like many of the subsequent memoirs and descriptions of the lives of the propagandists of the Bulgarian revival. In his Memoirs of the Bulgarian Uprisings: Eyewitness’ Reports. 1870–1876, Zahari Stoyanov tells similar polished stories of noble fighters for freedom and the hardships they had to endure.25

Even the revolutionaries who could hardly be considered ideologists left memoirs, in which they presented themselves as heroes fighting for the liberation of their respective nations. Panayot Hitov, for instance, started out as an outlaw in the Balkan Mountains only later to become one of the most prominent figures in the Bulgarian revolutionary movement.26 While Hitov was initially a hajduk and hardly an ideologist, the emigrant destinies of Hristo Botev, Lyuben Karavelov, or even the instigator of revolutions Georgi Rakovski did not differ significantly. During his exile in Romania, Botev shared space with the acclaimed national hero Vasil Levski, and lived in a windmill in the outskirts of Bucharest.27 Judging by the accounts of several of these public actors, one may wonder whether they can be considered “elites” and, if yes, how their identities can be fully defined.

The border between an ideologist and an outlaw is truly delicate, and arguably more delicate in the Bulgarian case than in any other. Romanticist elites as such represented a group of individuals who contributed to their national causes while forging or attempting to forge political cooperation, publishing their ideas, and spreading these ideas within and beyond their circles. In order to transmit a political statement, they needed to make it attractive and worthy of association both for their compatriots and for the agents in the host states. A “mobile elite” thus could not be a closed group. Mostly emigrant intellectuals tried to widen their club in a desperate search for support.28

While the earlier cases of the Polish emigrants are remarkably similar to their Bulgarian followers, they bear one significant difference.29 The Bulgarian intellectuals were almost all poor, of humble descent, and relatively unknown (initially) in the foreign circles, while the Polish elite included a number of rather famous, rich, or noble individuals. Hungarian post-1849 emigrants represented a similar pattern, although often featuring notable modest protagonists. Similarly, the Romanian exiles in Paris were overwhelming brilliantly educated and often rich noblemen.30 While in the long run, these social differences could easily be obscured by the strategy chosen by a given individual (the quantity and quality of publications and one’s active attempts to engage the public actors in the host state and the home state mattered), they initially posed obstacles for the career of a public actor. Lajos Kossuth was a “mere low-nobleman from Upper Hungary,” lacking the bright social standing of many of his peers,31 and he had to create a freedom-fighter reputation for himself rather than rely on the already existing financial and political power of his name or family. Many other Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish exiles, on the other hand, had the leverage that he lacked. Alexandru Golescu, for example, a rich Romanian noble and an emigrant in Paris, enjoyed a number of privileges derived from his status, which allowed him immediate entry into the higher circles of French social life.32 That was certainly not the case of Georgi Rakovski, who constantly had to struggle to win the recognition of the Russian, Serbian, or Romanian authorities.

Prominent nineteenth-century Bulgarian intellectuals had merchant or low-middle class backgrounds. Most of them had been educated in the Greek circles of the Ottoman Empire or in Russia.33Many opted for schools based in the Danubian Principalities or chose the institutions offered by the Ottoman Empire to their newly-groomed elites. Some of them would later continue their pursuit of knowledge in the West. Through the mixture of their Ottoman background, partially European education, local experiences, and connections to Western political ideals (including Kantian perceptions of a possible European world order) they reached fellow-intellectuals in Romania, Serbia, Russia, and Greece. Their destinies were not too different from the destinies of the intellectuals in the Habsburg or Russian Empires.34 Their orienteers lay in the West or in Russia. They wanted to belong to the circle of European intellectuals that encompassed foreign elites, yet they were not necessarily seen as such in their host societies. Nevertheless, the attempts of the Bulgarians to establish connections with the elites of their host states resembled the attempts of their Polish and Hungarian predecessors. They tried to engage the local agents who were either interested in their cause or shared some of their goals.35

The Bulgarian emigrants longed for international connections. In a typography in Bucharest, Botev enjoyed the company of a Polish emigrant named Henryk Dembicki (who was the illustrator of a journal published by Botev), a Russian emigrant named Nechaev, and a number of Romanian socialists.36 Nevertheless, his Bulgarian identity was never in question. He, like many of his compatriots, believed himself to be a representative of the Bulgarian nation, of which he had a rather romanticized and dramatized idea. Yet his connections to a diverse circle of intellectuals he had met in Romania shaped his vision of the Balkans. In 1875, Botev, addressing the publications of the Serbian newspapers regarding a possibility of a Serbian-Bulgarian union, wrote that any such idea had to be based on “the freedom of nations, personal freedoms, and free labor.”37 He therefore linked progressive European ideals of the time to the destiny of his nation. He published abroad and phrased his statements with the intention of giving them universal appeal, understandable not only to his revolutionary compatriots, but to the Serbian and Romanian elites. Botev, therefore, reconciled his identity as a Bulgarian and a revolutionary with that of an emigrant and a Romantic poet.

Romanian exile became a leitmotiv in the memoirs, letters and publications of the Bulgarian emigrants that was destined to create links between the intellectuals of the two countries in the middle of the nineteenth century. In July 1868, Kazakovich, a Bulgarian from Alexandria, wrote to one of the most prominent Bulgarians in Bucharest, Ivan Kasabov, that Romania offered the Bulgarian youth every opportunity for education and that teacher Hristo Zlatovich had been granted rights by the authorities to educate the local Bulgarian children to “feel Bulgarian even if they were born in Romania.”38 In 1869, in an article published in the newspaper Svoboda, Lyuben Karavelov called Romania “the Second Switzerland,”39 a sort of a bastion of liberty and culture. Overly idealistic federalist Karavelov certainly was not striving to give an adequate description of his host state. Rather, he sought to promote the links that could facilitate the accommodation of his fellow emigrants. His accounts were meant to explain to the local Bulgarian public that one could easily be Bulgarian in Romania. Moreover, he wished to convince them that both Romania and Bulgaria could benefit from the activities of the émigré communities in the long run.

The presence of the Bulgarian intellectuals in Romania brought not only the like-minded Romanian elites to them, as was true in the case of the connections between Rosetti and Botev. It also resulted in a number of coordinated publications that were intended to influence the mutual perceptions of the local public and the exiles. Such was the Buduchnost-Viitorul journal, published by Georgi Sava Rakovski. In an article published in 1864, he called Romania a “free and inviolable asylum,”40 where he could continue his political activities (although Rakovski’s whole destiny was marked by troubles caused by the authorities of the states in which he resided), remain Bulgarian, and become an internationally acknowledged intellectual, a multi-lingual regional agent, a prominent publicist, and a revolutionary.

It was a mixture of romanticism and mobility that made exiled elites exhibit a number of coexisting identities. “Exile” added flavor to a national cause, romanticizing it, while “emigration” was often associated with hardships and lack of acceptance. Mobile elites, paradoxically, embodied both. They were the people who often turned their “hardship” into romanticized banners to brandish in front of the public. They did not exhibit a singular identity, but encompassed several, often turning their rhetoric to the universal values of “progress and freedoms.” For example, Levski referred not simply to the “Bulgarian nation,” its interests, and displaced or mistreated Bulgarians, but rather to a “sacred and pure republic.”41 Universal romanticist values surpassed the standard agenda of being Bulgarian and appealed to wider audiences.42 The journals published by the emigrants often addressed the public in their host states (as was true in the case of Viitorul), tackling the issues that the Balkan nations might have in common. Highlighting shared burdens and goals rather than differences, the mobile elites created ideological links that could facilitate the acceptance of their compatriots by the foreign states. Furthermore, they mostly relied on their revolutionary networks to increase their influence on the foreign public.

Mobile Elites and Their Networking Systems: People with a Thousand Voices

As Deborah Rice points out, “[t]he original source of all social cohesion lies in interpersonal networks that emerge once two or more individuals perceive or experience a common ground between them.”43 The creation of that common ground and the avoidance of possible dangers was one of the key factors that determined the strategies adopted by the mobile elites. Too crude and active involvement, like in the case of Rakovski or Hitov, could create problems with the local authorities. Rakovski was convinced that foreign help was needed in order to create a viable Bulgarian nation-state in one form or another.44 His attempts to forge an alliance with the Greeks in 1840s and later in 1860s proved fruitless, as did his attempts to instigate a revolt in Brăila in 1841.45 The revolt was quickly put down by Prince Ghica, who valued peace with the Ottoman Empire more than he did friendly relations with the Bulgarian revolutionaries.

In the 1860s, Rakovski settled in Belgrade, where he once again attempted to find common goals with several prominent Serbian politicians. For a time, he managed to attract Michael Obrenovich to his cause.46 In Serbia, Rakovski started publishing his Danubian Swan, a journal aimed primarily at promoting the independence of the Bulgarian Exarchate from Constantinople and the emancipation of the Bulgarian nation.47 A vast array of interconnections is reflected in numerous organizations established by Rakovski and his compatriots outside of Bulgaria. Rakovski’s attempts to coordinate revolutionary activities in Serbia failed, and the legion that was supposed to liberate Bulgaria from the Ottomans was disbanded. Yet many of the volunteers assembled by Rakovski remained under the influence of his authority.

Most of these revolutionary networks relied on the tolerance of the local governments and the possibility of establishing a dialogue. In 1869, Dimitar Obshti invited Panayot Hitov to Brăila, assuring him that he did not have to worry about the local authorities, since they had connections with the local merchants. He wrote: “After having seen me, the merchants in Brăila asked about you, wondering why you would not come and what they can do to assist you.”48 In this case, personal connections turned into international connections that facilitated the intricacies of travel. The local merchants sustained personal or trade relations with the exiles. The emigrants promoted their political agendas and engaged their fellow revolutionaries with the help of the local intermediaries, whose ethnic backgrounds rarely mattered. Their ideological orientation played a more significant role.

Nevertheless, the attitudes of the emigrants could change quickly. Rakovski is only one of many examples of radically shifting opinions. He had initially regarded the Russian Empire as a savior of his nation, but within a decade he had changed his opinion dramatically.49 The emigrants living in Russia, on the other hand, had to adapt to the circumstances there, attempting to forge relations with prominent politicians and intellectuals whom they could attract to their side.

During his life in Russia, Lyuben Karavelov published a book consisting entirely of the dramatic tales about the lives of simple Bulgarians under the “Turkish yoke.”50 Written in Russian, the book first appeared in print in Moscow. While it is difficult to reflect on the volume’s overall popularity, the mere fact that it was published (with an optimistic dedication to the Russians who believed in common Slavic ideals and to whom Bulgarian lives mattered) offers testimony to the activities of a mobile intellectual, who attempted to forge connections with his peers in a host state.

The mobile elites persisted through communication, and this communication assured not only their success, but also opportunities for their peers to integrate. Karavelov hoped his book would be read by the Russian public, which would eventually feel compassion for his compatriots and the fate of his motherland. Similarly, the Bulgarian students in Petersburg wrote to Nikolay Ignatiev, a prominent Russian statesman and one of the architects of the favorable San-Stefano Treaty of 1878, asking for further assistance: “Your Excellency has justly drawn the borders of the San-Stefano Bulgaria, creating an ideal for the current and future generations of our nation.”51 The letter conveyed a message similar to that of Karavelov’s stories published in Russian. It was a hopeful acknowledgement of a connection, even if it might have been overstated, an attempt to gather support for a national cause. The Bulgarian students hoped to offer an example of Bulgarians in Russia, something that could attract public attention to their cause and influence the portrayal (preferably positively) of their compatriots in the Russian public sphere.

The important trait of emigrants in the eyes of their host societies is their deceiving “homogeneity.” The Polish romanticist emigrants (most prominently Chopin and Mickiewicz) made their nation a hit in France, much as Kossuth and Pulszky introduced the idea of a Hungarian nation to the West.52 Decades before, the protagonists of the Greek revival accomplished a similar goal for their nation, starting a wave of Philhellenism that enveloped all sides of European cultural life, including art and literature.53 What united these different people was their double status, i.e. that of an emigrant and that of a mobile intellectual. The Bulgarian elites had their share of successes as well, although on a smaller scale. The presence of the Bulgarian emigrants in Russia and the activities of the various Slavic societies inspired Ivan Turgenev to create a poem dedicated to the massacres in Bulgaria.54 Turgenev’s “Croquet at Windsor” was based on the aftermath of the April Uprising, while his famous novel On the Eve became a testimony to the stories of the Bulgarians living in Russia. On the Eve features a Bulgarian protagonist who was loosely modeled on a real emigrant, a student of Moscow State University.55 Migrants, intellectuals, and regular refugees provoked compassionate responses, which was precisely their intention.

Russian Slavophiles sought contact with the Balkan Slavs, and often their attempts were met eagerly by the Balkan public actors, including those residing in Russia.56 Furthermore, these mobile elites created symbolic capital for their compatriots, since a significant number of them were turned into national heroes, praised by both their peers and future generations. Vasil Levski became the epitome of a freedom fighter, used and abused in Bulgarian politics up to the present day,57 much like Lajos Kossuth and a long list of other European national heroes.58

Scrutinizing their lives, one may wonder what made precisely these individuals reference points for their fellow-intellectuals and followers. While there was certainly a vast array of different factors that contributed to an individual’s fame, including personal qualities and skills, mobility and a cohort of skillful chroniclers remained an important catalyst for the emergence subsequently of a reputation as a revolutionary. Zahari Stoyanov thoroughly documented the paths to Bulgarian liberation in his monumental work. Kossuth, for example, not only left volumes of writings in different languages himself, but also became a prominent figure in the memoirs of his peers.59 Vast informational networks united these intellectuals, turning some of them into chroniclers, others into heroes, and some into both. Thus, the methods they used to transmit information that could leave a lasting impact were rather straightforward. They presented themselves as truly transnational figures, although always highlighting their background, and they sought like-minded individuals in their host states with whom they attempted to engage (not always successfully). They tailored their ideas to the general Romanticist views and political trends of the epoch, and they actively published and spread the works of their compatriots and fellow revolutionaries. Thanks to their louder voices, they assumed the roles of “national representatives,” claiming to protect the interests of their fellow emigrants and their compatriots.

Mobile Elites and Their Political Impact: Failed Connections?

Empires often served as links that bound various public actors together: they offered career opportunities, regulated many aspects of their citizens’ lives, and, subsequently, assured a communication space that facilitated the exchange of ideas between various public figures.60 The emigrant revolutionaries in the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian Empires relied heavily on these imperial interconnections to curry support for their causes. Rakovski, Botev, and Karavelov all actively engaged in publishing journals and brochures. They hoped to address a wider audience, though their circle was relatively narrow.

Lyuben Karavelov published his apologetic remarks regarding federative ideas, mostly with the intention of attracting his co-nationals and involving foreign public actors. Criticizing the Greeks’ “favorable” relations with the Ottoman Empire, he wrote in the journal Svoboda, “[i]t becomes clear that the South Slavs and Romanians are more despised by the Greeks than the Mohammedans. Therefore, the Greeks resemble Hungarians, who like them, wish to create vast and powerful states without people.”61 Given the emigrants’ precarious relations even with their mobile fellows and local governments, their disappointed criticism of potential partners was justified. They sought connections, but their attempts to establish meaningful links failed more often than they succeeded.

The Bulgarian Secret Central Committee is one of the examples of a Bulgarian-Romanian collaborative effort that did not endure. The organization emerged in 1866 with several prominent Romanian liberals backing it.62 Subsequently, the prominent public actors of the organization forced Alexandru Ioan Cuza to abdicate, severely damaging Romanian relations with the Ottoman Empire. Following the events, Bulgarian elites living in Bucharest seemed resourceful allies to the Romanian liberals. Although Rakovski himself was not prone to cooperate with the liberals, another prominent emigrant, Ivan Kasabov, was eager to oblige. Kasabov hoped to further the outbreak of a Bulgarian revolt on Ottoman territory through the cooperative endeavor.63

The “Holly Coalition,” which was the result of this temporary alliance, had to ensure a full-fledged Balkan uprising with the subsequent establishment of a Balkan federative state. The Romanian side seemed eager to forge contacts with the emigrant revolutionaries, offering them funds in return for their military support. While the Bulgarian emigrant leaders had to ensure the participation of their compatriots in the affair, they established connections with the leaders of the host state. However, the alliance was short-lived. Following the restoration of Ottoman-Romanian relations and the election of Charles Hohenzollern as a new Romanian sovereign, cooperation with the Bulgarian emigrants in support of their cause ceased to be profitable for the Romanian side.64

Thus, most of the enterprises initiated by the Bulgarian mobile elites yielded little success.65 Nevertheless, after the emergence of the Bulgarian Principality, many of the emigrant’s ideas found new meaning in the policies of a newly-formed Bulgaria. In 1886, Prince Alexander Battenberg suggested a Romanian-Bulgarian alliance similar to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, a union that represented a way of improving the political statuses of both nations, heavily based on the ideas expressed by the Bulgarian emigrants, who had once lived in Romania.66 Furthermore, in a letter to Alexandru Sturdza, Battenberg reflected on the “brotherly hospitality” granted the Bulgarian exiles in Romania, something the prince considered an important foundation for strengthening the connections between the two nations.67

The emigrant elites offered solutions to the irredentist problems arising in Bulgaria and in their former host states. Nevertheless, most of their projects were either overly idealistic or were simply never really accomplished. With the appearance of the Bulgarian Principality, the former emigrants changed their goals and returned to Bulgaria. Some had accomplished careers in the new state (like Bulgaria’s distinguished prime minister, Stefan Stambolov), yet others perished before the signing of the treaty of Berlin (for instance Georgi Rakovski, Levski, and others). However, the patterns established by the mid-nineteenth-century emigrants persisted.

In 1902, a Bulgarian emigrant association from Macedonia in Ruse sent a letter to count Ignatiev. This time, a different cohort of emigrant elites was attempting to forge alliances and act as their group’s voices. These public actors not only adopted the strategies of their predecessors, the emigrants of the Bulgarian revival, but also relied on their experiences in addressing Ignatiev.

In their letter, the emigrants implored the count to come to their aid and use his influence to improve the position of all the Bulgarians:

Raise once again your powerful voice and proclaim that the Bulgarians from Macedonia and Odrin deserve support and political freedom, that the time has come for the sufferings of these slaves to end. The voices of these doomed ones make us mourn them, and we must meet with you, Your Grace, our dear and precious guest, with grief and sorrow.”68

Among the multiple addresses sent to Ignatiev by the emigrants, there was a series of remarkable attempts to connect the causes and views of the emigrants with those of the statesman.69 The Bulgarian public actors would allude to a common Slavic sentiment and the shared legacy of Orthodoxy, and they also mentioned the Greek threat and the “chimerical idea of a Byzantine Empire” that allegedly haunted the Greek rivals of the Bulgarian nationalists.

One of the reasons emigrant elites tended to be vocal in promoting the national causes lies in their precarious position. They depended on the good will of the officials of the host states, and they were either welcomed or considered a dangerous element. Under these circumstances, the existence of the Bulgarian legions in Serbia, the flourishing cultural life of the Bulgarian emigrants in Odessa,70 their revolutionary networking in the Danubian Principalities, and even their pursuit of studies in Russia were always at risk. Careful navigation within the complicated web of social networking was necessary for the mobile elites. They searched for ways to promote their respective national causes, and they served as voices for their fellow emigrants, who, even unwillingly, were often associated with their loud and proud representatives. Often the consequences of their careless actions could be projected upon the whole group of migrants. The mobile ideologists were perceived not only as prominent public actors promoting the Romanticist cause of national emancipation, but also as “others.”

The balance between those two aspects depended on both the actions of the elites and the political circumstances in which they lived. Many of the former emigrants and their associates became genuinely important links between their respective group and the foreign powers. Stoyan Zaimov, a public figure and writer, is one such example. Decades after the Russian-Turkish War of 1877/78, Zaimov received a message from Petr Agatev, a Russian friend, who thanked him for his hospitality and guidance during his visit to Bulgaria, expressing his wish to popularize the cause of the “Tsar-liberator” committee in Russia. Agatev wrote, “I send you my sincere gratitude for the commemoration of the deeds and the preservation of the memory of our soldiers perished in Bulgaria.”71 The connections established years before the Balkan Wars had their impact on the lasting relations between various factions, including the links between the local intellectuals.

Conclusion: Emigrants, Intellectuals, Visionaries?

Mobile elites represent a specific stratum of migrants that has the important function of mediating relations between their peers and the host states, influencing both simultaneously. Mobile elites target prominent public figures in their host states, engaging them in the creation of projects and plans that have the potential to reshape the political balance in a region. Mobile intellectuals get involved in local politics, while attempting to promote the agendas of their group. Furthermore, they attempt to bind their group’s wellbeing with that of the host state, assuring their group’s integration. When their activities are aimed at national liberation and similar causes, they promote peaceful existence and political unions with their host states.72

While most of the mobile mid-nineteenth century agents can be regarded as typical political emigrants, they belonged to a much larger club of European intellectuals, sharing and discussing the ideas of Mazzini or Kossuth and receptive to the latest political trends not only in their respective region, but abroad. Their connections to the Western space of political ideas made them international figures, often with equal fame. However, they were not simply international intellectuals, but agents who were instrumental in accommodating their migrant peers, who were less vocal in foreign societies. While mobile intellectuals never ceased being emigrants, willingly or not, they represented the entire group of migrants. While this particularity often determined the actions of the elites, it also granted them a rare opportunity to speak as voices of their nation. Thus, they subsequently influenced their own societies by creating future reference points, such as memoirs and chronicles of their own actions and those of their fellow emigrants.

In 1868, Hristo Botev wrote,

...[i]f the whole of the Bulgarian nation rises, Serbia and Montenegro surpass their borders and the Bosnians and Herzegovinians put down their weapons before Andrassy’s second proclamation the (Eastern) question will be solved and the freedom of the Balkan peninsula will be assured. Isn’t this the era we are entering now?73

His multiple publications addressed a diverse public. Botev targeted his fellow emigrants and people who might have shared his goals and beliefs in the foreign countries. He reflected on the destinies of the peoples of the Balkan peninsula, looking at the streets of Bucharest and attempting to define his own place in the state that hosted him and could become a worthy ally in the future. He was Bulgarian, yet he was a Romantic poet like his Romantic European counterparts, having more in common with Petőfi or Mickiewicz than with an uneducated peasant in the Balkan Mountains. He managed to walk on the edges of identities and to fit into two groups and influence not only Bulgarian literature and political thought, but also the societies in which he dwelled. While many emigrants failed (sometimes miserably) to achieve their immediate goals (uprisings, revolutions, etc.), they offer a keen researcher a pattern of accommodation that is seldom acknowledged. Their activities had impacts that transcended their own time and sent messages to future generations.

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God Brought the Hungarians: Emigration and Refugee Relief in the Light of Cold War Religion

James P. Niessen

Rutgers University

The ample literature on the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956/57 has focused on its diplomatic and political aspects, mentioning the role of religions and faith-based organizations only in passing. This study seeks to address this lacuna by focusing on religion as an element of the Cold War, a motive for emigration, and an organizing framework for refugee relief. The chronology begins with the end of World War II. Austria, the country of first asylum, and the United States, the dominant financier and resettlement country, are the primary geographic focus. Reflecting the preponderance of Catholics in the Hungarian migrants’ population, special attention is given to Catholic Relief Services, though Jewish aid organizations and the World Council of Churches are not neglected.

Keywords: religion, Hungarian refugees, Catholic Relief Services, World Council of Churches, Camp Kilmer

Current interest in the refugee phenomenon has inspired valuable new research on the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956/57. The crisis was the focus of several panels at the 1956 and Socialism conference in Eger in September 2016, and it was the theme of an issue of the journal Világtörténet published several weeks later.1 Authors have rightly pointed out the role of the Cold War conflict in determining the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, the flight of 200,000 citizens to Austria and Yugoslavia, and their warm reception and, for the most part, fairly rapid resettlement. There are many worthwhile publications in Hungarian, German, and English about the international and local aspects of this crisis.2

Historians have generally mentioned religious factors only in passing. In this essay, I call attention to several non-government archival collections which few historians have consulted, and I examine the phenomenon of Cold War religion, Hungarian religious identity as a motivating factor in the decision to emigrate, and above all the role of faith-based relief organizations. The chronological frame begins in the immediate postwar period, providing the prehistory of the Hungarian crisis before focusing on the aftermath of the Revolution. The politics and resolution of the crisis were international, but Austria and the United States played unique roles and receive most of my attention. Nearly all the refugees who left Hungary in 1956/57 and earlier came through Austria, where they were granted initial asylum and the opportunity to settle, repatriate, or travel onward. The United States proved the most popular destination of resettlement for both economic and political reasons, and ultimately the United States accepted more refugees than any other country. The United States was also decisive in the financial, political, and organizational resolution of the refugee crisis of 1956/57.

Religious persecution had led to many earlier waves of emigration in the history of Europe. This was especially the case in early modern Europe, and indeed it was fundamental to the establishment of Geneva in Switzerland as the center of international humanitarianism. Three centuries after Geneva provided a home and ecclesiastical center for Calvinist fugitives, it became the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions (1864–1949) for the treatment of non-combatants in wartime, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Nations, and, after World War II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and many related agencies.3

Cold War Religion

One of the important memory sites for Hungarian Americans and historians of the refugee crisis of 1956/57 no longer exists today: Camp Kilmer in Piscataway, New Jersey. The closed army camp was reactivated in November 1956 as the central reception center for Hungarian refugees to the U.S., and in five months received more than 32,000 of them. Americans greeted the new arrivals with banners and signs bearing the inscription: Welcome [to America], in English and in Hungarian. A Hungarian in Camp Kilmer explained to Eileen Egan of Catholic Relief Services: “The words mean, in our way of expressing it, ‘God brought you.’ That is ‘Isten Hozta.’ You say this to guests whom you welcome gladly.”4 The Hungarian phrase appears in at least one decidedly unreligious context in American political history: President Bill Clinton employed it as a toast welcoming President Árpád Göncz in 1999, and he claimed it had appeared on streamers welcoming exiled statesman Lajos Kossuth to New York in 1851.5 We do not know the intention behind the use of the Hungarian phrase during the Hungarian crisis, but it will serve here as a gateway into a discussion of the ways in which religion and politics overlapped at the time.

The Chairman of the President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief, Tracy S. Voorhees, is at the center in both government photos below. In the photo on the right, he is welcoming a refugee ship in Brooklyn, and in the photo on the left he is at Camp Kilmer. The others appear to be exclusively American officials. Voorhees was very attentive to the impact of public image: he wanted the world to see the contrast between humanitarian America, with its peaceful use of the military, and Soviet oppression. The reference to God would have been invisible to most Americans, but it was not lost on the Hungarians (the text in the photo, “Isten hozott,” is the same phrase as the phrase cited above, “Isten Hozta,” but using the informal form of address in Hungarian). God was missing in Communist Hungary’s public discourse, but was prominent in that of contemporary America.

East European Communists persecuted religion both on ideological grounds and in order to eliminate autonomous centers of resistance. This pattern was important for the emerging association in the West of anti-Communism with religious identity. The nexus of the Cold War and religion in the U.S. has attracted the attention of much recent scholarship. Dianne Kirby writes in her contribution to the Cambridge History of Christianity: “The concept of the Cold War as one of history’s great religious wars, a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless, derives from the fact that ideology, based on and informed by religious beliefs and values, was central in shaping both perceptions of and responses to the USSR.”6 The Jewish conservative Will Herberg argued in his popular 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology that American ethnic history had evolved toward a common “framework,” “the American way of life.”7 He went on to claim that this framework might even be seen as a jointly held religion. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1960 that Communism’s threat was stymied “by the historical dynamism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.”8

This was America, where politicians’ declarations of faith still respected the strict separation of churches and state. But what about Europe? Pope Pius XII had been cautious in his stance toward the Third Reich in World War II, arguably because of the dangers posed to the Church in occupied Europe and to the Vatican itself. Communism posed no such existential threat to the Vatican, though in postwar Italy it was a serious political threat. The Pope’s encyclical denouncing contemporary atheism, Anni Sacri (1950), did not name Communism or the Soviet Union, but it left no doubt about the Pope’s view of Soviet religious policy. The emerging Christian Democratic parties, while they grew out of the Catholic political tradition of protecting the weak and favoring a mixed economy, shared the American condemnation of Communism and support for the Atlantic alliance. They generally had the support of religious leaders in these stances.9 The Holy See rejected Communism even more strongly than did West European political leaders. Its decree of July 1949 stated that “Catholics who ‘profess, defend or propagate’ communist doctrine should be excommunicated as apostates.”10

The dominant status of the Catholic Church in Austria was governed by the formally still valid Concordat of 1933, which had been suppressed by the Third Reich and subsequently restored, but not recognized by the Austrian socialists. European governments typically contributed to the financial support of the churches, but rarely interfered in their administrative decisions.11 In the U.S., the homeland of Cold War religion, religious organizations supported themselves solely through private donations.

Religion and the Refugee Relief Agencies

Both in North America and in Western Europe, the churches supported agencies for the care of the disadvantaged members of society that organized hospitals, food assistance, and missionary activity, both at home and abroad. Of greatest impact were the Catholic agencies, the National Catholic Welfare Conference-Catholic Relief Service in the U.S. and Caritas in most European countries. Protestants and Jews had analogous organizations.

These agencies were engaged in refugee relief, and not only in their home countries. Both Hebrew and Christian scripture stipulates that the faithful should practice hospitality and compassion to strangers in their midst. The Book of Exodus recounts an escape from slavery to freedom and asserts: “You shall not oppress an alien; you well know how it feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). The Gospel of Matthew recounts the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, and Luke recounts Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan and concludes with the admonition to “go and do likewise.” The Acts of the Apostles downplay the importance of borders and preach the common humanity of people, regardless of ancestry. Christians and Jews don’t always observe these principles, but the principles inspire their refugee relief activity.12

Jewish mutual aid and Christian missions signaled the entry of the U.S. onto the international humanitarian scene in the late nineteenth century. As the country entered World War I in 1917, its government encouraged the mobilization of religious organizations to meet anticipated humanitarian needs. The massive population movements of World War II created an even greater challenge for armies and a role for non-governmental agencies. The leaders of the advancing Allied forces, especially in the U.S. Army, realized that they needed help. It was natural that they turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross and its national affiliates. The religiously based agencies were more diverse, but the spiritual dimension enabled them not only to raise funds rapidly (at which the Red Cross was very adept), but also to mobilize a broadly based network of agencies and communities for volunteer work. The need and opportunity created a conundrum in American law, however: in view of the separation of church and state, what would be the nature of the collaboration between the government and the religious agencies? The solution was to create on the one hand a federal office to accredit the NGOs (the prevailing term was voluntary agencies) and, on the other, a private organization consisting of these accredited agencies, which would coordinate their work and interface with the government. The private organization, established in 1944, was the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS). A central principle of the ACVAFS was the primacy of service over sectarianism. The Committee on Migration and Refugee Affairs rapidly became the ACVAFS’s most active component.13

European countries faced less of a challenge in coordinating the voluntary agencies because they had a history of financial and political involvement in the churches. Organizations analogous to the ACVAFS arose in all West European countries in the immediate postwar years, and they were themselves coordinated beginning in 1948 by the Standing Conference of Voluntary Agencies Working for Refugees.14

The chief religiously based agencies that were engaged on behalf of refugees were those of the Catholics, the Jews, the Lutherans, the Quakers, and the World Council of Churches.

The Catholic agencies in most countries bore the name Caritas and operated under the authority of diocesan bishops, but with a national federation for coordination. In the wake of World War II, the American counterpart would soon dwarf each local Caritas in its resources. During the war, it assumed the name War Relief Services-National Catholic Welfare Conference, renamed Catholic Relief Services (CRS-NCWC) in 1955. The CRS established offices in most European countries at the end of the war, both to distribute food and clothing but, increasingly after 1948, also to coordinate resettlement into third countries. A board of American archbishops and bishops met periodically in Washington, DC to oversee the WRS/CRS, and it was encouraged in its work by the Holy See. The coordinator of all of the activities of the CRS in Europe was a Catholic layman and former religious brother from New Jersey, James J. Norris.15

Pope Pius XII promulgated his apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana [The Exiled Family from Nazareth] in 1952 to affirm the compassionate concern of the Church for migrants, including the practice of appointing missionary priests for migrants of their own nationality. The document placed the newly founded International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) in a historical and doctrinal context.16 The ICMC, led for the first ten years of its existence by Norris and based in Geneva, would coordinate aid to migrants by country-based agencies, organize international conferences on the subject, and publish a journal entitled Migration News beginning in 1951.17

Two major agencies and then the newly emerged State of Israel were the principal sources of Jewish relief. The American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) worked largely to aid Jewish communities in place, while the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was older, not as well funded, and focused largely on migrants and resettlement. In light of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the relief work of these agencies relied less on scriptural injunctions than on fundamental solidarity.18 Zionism and resettlement in Israel were less of a concern for these organizations than they were for the Jewish Agency, which was formed in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel and then supported by the new state afterwards.

The World Lutheran Federation (WLF) served to bring together the variants of this denomination, which reflected various organizational and doctrinal solutions in their respective countries. The Evangelisches Hilfswerk was an important Lutheran relief organization for postwar Germany and Austria, where the initial focus of refugee relief was on the eleven million German expellees from the East. The American branch of the WLF serving refugees was the Lutheran Relief Service, LRS.

The humanitarian engagement of the Quakers was of long standing, and organized in the twentieth century as the Friends Relief Service and its American arm, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Reflecting the relatively small membership of this denomination, the AFSC engaged with needy communities of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Ecumenical activists inspired the eventual foundation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva in 1948, whose arm for refugee relief was Church World Service. The WCC’s membership included most Protestant and Orthodox churches and often worked closely with the Lutherans and Quakers. Roland Elliott of Church World Service wrote about his encounter with Hungarians at the border with Austria: “I have seen the face of Jesus Christ, as His Church is struggling to meet this tragic and heroic situation...we have the privileged responsibility of opening our homes to those who come to the U.S.A.”19 The words of Gaither P. Warfield, the Director of the Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief, may adequately summarize the thinking of many Protestants. He wrote in 1958 that “Christian charity says that needy people, even panhandlers, are personalities, loved by God and precious in his sight.”20

The Catholic Church was not a member of the WCC, and the anxiety of some Catholic leaders about CWS contact with Catholic migrants helped inspire the establishment of the ICMC. Norris, whose Catholic piety and doctrinal orthodoxy were never in doubt, was quite happy to collaborate with his non-Catholic counterparts. I found no evidence that his clerical superiors in the CRS had a problem with this. Indeed, he had a good working relationship with the Holy See’s Deputy Secretary of State, Msgr. Montini, the later Pope Paul VI.

Two accounts of the refugee work of the CRS and WCC during the 1950s by Edgar H.S. Chandler and Eileen Eagan reveal significant similarities in these organizations’ service to migrants around the world. Chandler, the Director of the WCC’s Refugee Service and President of the Standing Conference of Voluntary Agencies Working for Refugees in 1959, was an American Congregationalist. In his view, the refugee worker was a sort of missionary, but one with a “soul on fire” to help one’s fellow human in need, anywhere and regardless of nationality and denomination. His 1959 account of the WCC’s refugee work only occasionally mentions the religion of WCC staffers and their clients around the world.21 Egan was a long-time staffer of the CRS. She wrote, “Thomas Merton recalls to us that we will find Christ in the rejected, the refugee ‘for whom there is no room.’ We will only find Christ if we find room for the forsaken ones in our heart.”22 Egan’s book only rarely mentions the WCC, and Chandler’s the CRS. It may be that these groups represented different fundamental attitudes toward social service. In the view of Edward Duff, the Catholic approach was more communitarian, while that of the Protestants was predicated on the faith of the individual.23 By analogy, the Protestant and Orthodox churches organized themselves on an explicitly national basis. The WCC, however, was no less international than the Catholic Church.

According to Allied and Soviet estimates, each bloc was caring for roughly seven million displaced persons (DPs) in September 1945. Repatriation and resettlement of many of these people took place over the course of two years under the auspices of the United Nations, but the task of providing care for migrants in place fell principally on the voluntary organizations. The expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by 1947 increased the unsettled population in occupied Germany again, and again the volunteer organizations were needed. Two new categories of migrants moved westward into Central Europe in 1946–48: Jewish survivors and opponents of the emerging Communist regimes. We will now turn to these groups as they relate to Hungary.

The Hungarian Refugee

The number of non-Jewish DPs from Hungary in the western occupation zones at the end of the war has been estimated at 112,000, of which 16,000 had been repatriated by September 1945.24 118,000 DPs from Hungary were registered in Germany in 1949.25 Many DPs were politically conservative, including adherents of the last wartime Hungarian government. Hungarian Primate Cardinal Mindszenty encouraged émigré priests to provide spiritual care for Hungarians who remained abroad. The Holy See appointed a former military chaplain who had come to Germany with the retreating Hungarians, Zoltán Kótai, as supervisor of pastoral care for Hungarian Catholics in Germany and Austria, and he served in this position in 1946–50. In January 1946, he reported that 109 Hungarian priests were active in Germany and Austria. The Protestant Hungarians also had their émigré clergy, and in greater numbers than the Catholics, whose bishops urged priests to stay with their parishes in Hungary if possible.26

Jewish survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust were also present among the DPs in Germany and Austria. Scandalously, they were often housed alongside their former German and Hungarian persecutors in the camps, but with a lower caloric ration. An American rabbi in the U.S. Army’s chaplain corps, Abraham J. Klausner, was an early witness to these conditions, and an American Protestant scholar named Earl G. Harrison, the U.S. representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, toured the camps with the assistance of the European director of the JDC and wrote a report that was instrumental in rectifying these injustices. 27

A study commissioned by the World Jewish Congress indicated that 165,330 Jews had survived the Holocaust in Hungary and remained there at the end of the war. This figure may not adequately account for changes in borders, migration, and self-identity.28 A wave of anti-Semitic incidents in Hungary during the spring of 1946, more or less tolerated by the police, prompted many survivors to leave Hungary. Financial support from the JDC and World Jewish Congress and the collaboration of the Hungarian National Bank facilitated the resettlement of 15,000 Hungarian Jewish survivors.29 This emigration was part of an international movement and a complex organization known as Brichah, flight, which brought perhaps 250,000 Jews out of Central Europe between 1945 and 1948.30 The total post-Holocaust Jewish emigration from Hungary up to 1956 may have been as high as 50,000. 17,000 Jewish refugees may have gone to Israel and less than half that number to the U.S.31

Aid to Hungary’s religious groups in money and in kind was substantial after the end of the war. The JDC recommenced operation in Hungary at the end of 1944, and it had an office in Budapest from February 1945 until it was forced to close in 1953. The value of support for Hungary during this period is recorded as nearly 50 million USD, prompting a historian to refer to this aid as a “small Marshall Plan for Hungary.”32 The JDC managed to maneuver for years in the complex politics of the anti-Fascist but also increasingly anti-Zionist regime. The CRS was able to open an office in Budapest at the end of 1945, but it had to close it earlier than the JDC, in 1950. Aid to Hungary raised by the American Catholic bishops was small compared to that from the JDC, recorded as 631,600 USD in Hungary in 1947–50.33

The early closure of the CRS office in Budapest reflected the difficult position of the Catholic Church in Hungary, whose combative leader, Cardinal Mindszenty, was arrested in 1949. As was its custom in other countries, the ACVAFS established a committee to coordinate the activity of its member agencies in Hungary, but it only functioned from 1946 to 1948. Its chairman was Henry E. Muller of the Unitarian Service Committee, whose coreligionists constituted one-tenth of one percent of the population according to the 1949 census (Catholics were 70.5 percent, Calvinists 21.9 percent, and Jews 2.7 percent). New agencies joined the committee in 1947, and the agencies’ food and clothing aid reportedly had the support of Prime Minister Lajos Dinnyés, but at its last meeting in June 1948 the members reported that operations in Hungary were becoming increasingly difficult because of the government’s distrust of foreign influence and organizational autonomy.34

The leaders of Hungary’s Christian churches and Jewish community were obliged in 1949–50 to conclude restrictive agreements. Marxist ideology saw no constructive role for religious faith, and the Hungarian regime saw none for clergy or organizations not under its complete control. The nationalization of schools run by the Catholic church removed 4,500 members of religious orders from the classroom. In 1950, 11,000 members of orders were expelled from their residences and 59 orders were abolished.35 Protestant and Jewish schools were also nationalized. Show trials led to the imprisonment of Cardinal Mindszenty, his successor as leader of Hungarian Catholics, Archbishop Grősz, and large numbers of other clergy. Lutheran bishop Lajos Ordass was tried and imprisoned, and Reformed bishops László Ravasz and László Pap were forced out of public life.

Religious order priests whose schools were closed were for the most part deprived of opportunities to serve as priests. Some found placement in the parishes thanks to the support of bishops who were willing to take this risky step, but many left the country illegally. Law XXVI, promulgated in 1950, defined illegal travel abroad as a crime against the state order because it deprived the country of labor and capital and placed the fugitive in the service of imperialist interests and spies.36 More than 70 Jesuits, Cistercians, and Paulines left the country illegally in this period.37 Those accused of assisting illegal emigration were tried and convicted under Law XXVI.

The CRS sponsored the resettlement of hundreds of Catholic clergy from East Central Europe to the U.S. Fr. László Szépe, the coordinator of the priests serving Hungarian refugees in Austria, wrote to the office in New York in 1949: “as our people are gradually emigrating, and a part of them of them is leaving for the United States, some of the clergymen would like to follow them. Would you kindly send me the necessary forms.” The annual report of WRS to its supervisory board for 1951–52 stated that “415 displaced priests from Iron Curtain countries have been brought to US since 1948.”38

Religious congregations in the diaspora were well supplied with new immigrant clergy. For many emigrants, the loss of the homeland, hunger, the uncertainty of life in the DP camps, and then adjustment to a new homeland after resettlement were dispiriting. The Catholic priests’ sense of mission lent purpose and optimism to their segment of the Hungarian emigration.39 In the reports to Hungary’s spy agency, the harmful influence of the “reactionary” clergy on Hungarian emigrants and their hostile attitude toward the socialist order were repeatedly emphasized.40 Religious communities provided an important support network for the recent Hungarian émigrés. To the extent that they had a political orientation, it was indeed decidedly conservative.

International Organizations and Austria in 1956

Three successive agencies of the United Nations coordinated refugee relief on behalf of the international organization beginning in 1943: the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and, beginning in 1951, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Continuing challenges for these organizations included the international dispute about their purpose and the limited funding placed at their disposal. The status of refugee, defined by the Geneva Convention of 1951, prescribed political or religious persecution in one’s home country as a precondition, and thus excluded many emigrants from international protection. The Soviet Union favored repatriation of emigrants, and resettlement was supported increasingly by the West as an alternative, but subject to the willingness of the receiving country. Another international agency in Geneva, which focused on resettlement and excluded members of the Soviet bloc, was the Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration (ICEM).

The UNHCR relied upon the Red Cross, ICEM, and the voluntary agencies to compensate for its own limitations. The first High Commissioner, the Dutchman Dr. G. J. van Heuven Goedhart, far from taking a rigidly secular stance, recognized the religious motivation of many voluntary agencies as appropriate and valuable. His address at the international Catholic migration congress organized by the ICMC in the Netherlands in September 1954 followed one by Msgr. Edward E. Swanstrom, the Executive Director of WRS. Applauding the American monsignor’s remarks, Goedhart asserted that “the Christian spirit behind the work is the main impetus, the most important impetus, which will lead us to achieve our goal.”41

The goal of refugee relief—resettlement, permanent settlement, or repatriation—was an ongoing challenge for Austria, which received two million refugees after 1945 of whom about 700,000 would eventually remain in Austria.42 Some 114,000 so-called old refugees, 20,000 of them living in camps, remained in Austria on the eve of the Hungarian crisis.43 Some were German expellees for whom the Austrian government took responsibility, while others were non-Germans. Thus the Austrian government, UNHCR, and associated agencies were collaborators of long standing; the UNHCR, ICEM, and the voluntary agencies maintained offices in Vienna, and both the ACVAFS and its Austrian counterpart periodically convened meetings of their affiliated agencies.44 The achievement of Austrian sovereignty by the State Treaty of 1955 increased the government’s ability to address emigrants’ needs by eliminating the division of the country into zones of military occupation and reducing the pressure by the Soviet Union for the repatriation of émigrés. The ruling coalition of the two major parties, ÖVP (the People’s Party, or Christian Democrats) and SPÖ (the Socialists), was united in its support for sovereignty and refugee relief. The ÖVP supplied Austria’s Chancellor, Julius Raab, and Foreign Minister, Leopold Figl, while the SPÖ supplied the Minister of Interior, Oskar Helmer. As we will see, Helmer played a crucial role in the refugee program.

In the spirit of the government coalition, Austria’s Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter on social concerns criticizing both liberal capitalism and Communism and calling for social solidarity and partnership, with the traditional Catholic preference for local over government initiative.45 The bishops’ letter, dated October 16, 1956, was surely in the minds of many Austrian Catholics on the eve of the Hungarian revolution. The Catholic Archbishop of Vienna, Franz König, called upon his SOS Department and Caritas to collect and distribute donations for Hungarians after October 23. Both the Austrian government and the UN General Assembly called for an end to the fighting and the sending of humanitarian aid to the Hungarian people. The leaders of Austrian Caritas and the WCC delivered a major shipment to Győr on October 31, and convoys of Caritas and the Red Cross made it as far as Budapest. Donations of medicine, food, and clothing from governments and private agencies began arriving in Austria and Hungary by land and air. Archbishop König became co-chair of an Österreichisches Nationalkommittee für Ungarn, which coordinated aid “with the participation of all welfare groups, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, public and private.” Fr. Fabian Flynn, the head of the CRS office in Vienna, reportedly led two convoys with ten trucks of supplies to Budapest and personally met Cardinal Mindszenty, but was turned back on a third trip.46 Other religious agencies were similarly engaged.

After the second Soviet intervention on November 4, the aid convoys were no longer able to enter Hungary. There was a new emphasis on refugee relief, which the UN’s General Secretary assigned to the UNHCR. On October 28, when 10,000 refugees had already entered Austria, Oskar Helmer declared that his country would grant asylum to any Hungarian who requested it, without examining individuals’ motives. Fearing much larger numbers would overwhelm Austria, Helmer wired the countries represented in the leadership of the UNHCR and ICEM on November 4 to ask them to pledge donations and accept Hungarians for resettlement.

Religious Agencies Meet the Refugee Crisis in Austria

The UNHCR and ICEM had access to national governments (among which the American government donated more money and material for refugee relief than any other source), but the voluntary societies had the ability to mobilize rapidly and motivate volunteers. As the flow of Hungarians across the largely open Austrian border swelled on 4 November, Helmer called an emergency meeting of König’s committee, and Caritas volunteers began a desperate effort to prepare the former Soviet camp at Traiskirchen. The camp was in terrible shape when the first Hungarians arrived that evening. But many organizations pitched in to get the situation under control. A British Quaker reported:

One sees...all manner of uniforms. A boy scout for instance, suddenly charges up a long flight of stairs; a Catholic priest goes from room to room; a journalist squats on the edge of
somebody’s bed struggling to get a coherent story on to [sic] paper. All have come to help; everybody wants to do something useful, and it is indeed surprising that out of the chaos little miracles of organization do emerge and impossible things do get done.47

Having relatively small communities in the countries of resettlement, the Quakers were given the task of overall coordination of clothing distribution in the camp.

At a higher level, the agency leaders found coordination challenging because of their organizations’ independence, missionary impulse, and the extraordinary emergency they faced and wanted to address without delay. Charles H. Jordan was the JDC’s Director General for Overseas Operations representing the Standing Conference of Voluntary Agencies. He convened agencies in Vienna on the evening of November 5 in hopes of leaving immediately afterwards for consultations in New York, but decided to delay his departure. The ICEM office reported after talking to him that, “[e]ach voluntary agency evidently wanted its own particular empire protected and there was great difficulty to combine ideas and co-ordinate activities,” and “Jordan was thoroughly disappointed with the outcome of the meeting.” ICEM for its part disapproved of the desire of Caritas and CRS to move Catholic refugees out of the camps and into smaller, private facilities. ICEM objected to this and resolved to consult Norris about it.48

The push by the Austrian government for resettlement, to which ICEM, the UNHCR, and member governments were responding, prompted resistance by the voluntary agencies. Helmer and ICEM preferred to keep the refugees in camps as long as they were in Austria so that they could be registered there and communicate promptly with governments about resettlement opportunities. Caritas for its part claimed that many refugees were deciding in favor of resettlement too hastily, under the pressure of the inhumane and demoralizing conditions in the camps and the recruitment efforts of receiving countries. Traiskirchen, it was reported, could provide places to sleep for only three-fourths of its 4,000 residents, and it lacked electricity and running water. Caritas arranged and helped pay (with support from the government) for thousands of refugees to stay in hotels where they could recover from the shock of their life-changing experience, receive counselling about options for employment, resettlement, or even repatriation (“for no one has the right to deny fugitives their homeland forever”), and decide whether they wanted to travel farther or wait for their relatives.49 The program was called Gastaktion, “because Christ comes as guest in the person of the refugee.” Its originator was the director of Vienna Caritas since 1950, Msgr. Leopold Ungar, and it was reportedly imitated by the Evangelisches Hilfswerk, JDC, and the Knights of Malta, another Catholic aid organization, which all created similar programs.50

In the case of the JDC, more was involved than parallel thinking, let alone imitation. According to the JDC Annual Report,

Because Austria had the greatest difficulty in accommodating refugees—in the beginning the camps even lacked basic necessities—the Austrian Government appealed to the population and to voluntary agencies for help. Jewish refugees also found it difficult to be quartered with some antagonistic elements among the Hungarians and [the] JDC thereupon set up a housing scheme for the placement of 9000 refugees in inns, hotels, furnished rooms and small installations.

This was very expensive, and it was gradually superseded by the establishment of two Austrian camps exclusively for Jewish refugees supported jointly by the Red Cross, the Austrian government, and the JDC.51 The provision of kosher kitchens was one consideration, but not the only one, since Orthodox Jews constituted only a minority of the Hungarian Jews.

The religious agencies gave special, but not exclusive, attention to their coreligionists. There were variations in the religious distribution of the refugees in 1956–57 compared to the data in Hungary’s 1949 census. Two surveys by the Austrian government52 of the Hungarians still present in the country in February and October 1957 found the percentage of Catholics consistent with their percentage in 1949, that of the Protestants lower, and that of the Jews much higher:

1949 census53 February 1, 1957 October 28, 1957

Greek, Roman Catholics	70.5 percent	68.3 percent	70.1 percent
Reformed + Lutherans	27.1 percent	16.1 percent	18.7 percent
Jews	2.7 percent	10.2 percent	10.5 percent

 

Table 1. Religious distribution of Hungarians in Austria

The low percentage of Protestants may be in large part a consequence of the emigrants’ geographic origin. A later analysis of the emigrants by Hungary’s Central Statistical Office provided no religious data, but noted that more than 80 percent of the refugees had a last Hungarian place of residence in Budapest or towns further west, whereas the largest concentration of Protestants was in the east.54 In the case of 365 refugees interviewed by the Columbia University Research Project Hungary (CURPH), whose metadata are searchable online, a preponderance of Catholics and residents of Budapest is observable.55 One may argue, as does András Mink is examining the CURPH findings, that “Western observers...had an obsolete image of an essentially rural and religious Hungarian society and disregarded the urbanization, industrialization and secularization that had been under way [sic] long before the communist takeover.”56 The fact remains that governments and relief agencies, and not only CURPH, attached importance to religious categories.

A modest but significant number of clergy left the country. Of the 365 CURPH interview subjects, seven were identified as Catholic priests.57 Applying the same ratio for the 200,000 56ers would produce a total of 3,836 priests. The leadership of the Jesuits in Hungary voted after the Revolution to send the thirty novices of its province abroad.58 The superior of the Paulines, István Jenő Csellár, had been imprisoned in 1951 for various alleged crimes, including providing assistance for illegal émigrés. Csellár himself joined the exodus after the Revolution, as evidenced by his petition for admission to the U.S. from Austria, along with two other members of his order. He entered the U.S. in July 1957. 59

The percentage of Jewish emigrants was remarkably high relative to their remaining population, which had continued to shrink after 1949 due to legal and illegal emigration. Given the varying criteria for Jewish identity, historians are cautious in their estimates of the number of Jewish 56ers, ranging from 15,000 to 30,000, from one-fifth to one-third of the members of the Jewish population of Hungary who had remained on the eve of the revolution. Jewish survivors in Hungary were understandably anxious about the possibility of an anti-Semitic upsurge, and this, more than the actual incidents during the revolution, may explain the Jewish exodus.60 Fully two-thirds (8117) of the Hungarian citizens granted permission to emigrate legally in the first five months of 1957 emigrated to Israel.61

A high percentage of all the emigrants chose the United States as their desired destination, between 45 percent and 53 percent in the two Austrian surveys.62 More émigrés ended up settling in the U.S. than in any other country, but there were many who, hoping in vain for an American visa, refused to go elsewhere and became demoralized and in some cases suicidal.

The U.S. was as eager as other countries to expedite resettlement, as was urgently demanded by the Austrians, but it faced certain legal limitations unknown to other receiving countries. A provision in the Refugee Relief Act stated that an entry visa required an assurance that the traveler would not become a public charge, and during the period of greatest urgency the voluntary agencies were granted responsibility for assurances based on a quota for their coreligionists. Pierce Gerety, special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State for refugee affairs, told an emergency meeting of the ACVAFS in November: “The Austrian government wants these people out as quickly as possible.” The committee’s chair, Msgr. Swanstrom, and other agency representatives expressed concern about pressure for rapid action, especially because they did not want to be the ones to decide who would get visas to enter the U.S.63 It was apparently this peculiarity in American procedures that prompted an agreement between the CRS and ICMC according to which the CRS would focus its immigration counseling on movements to the U.S., whereas the ICMC and Caritas would “counsel schemes both inside and outside Europe.”64 Fr. Flynn wrote New York from the Vienna office of the CRS describing the pressure he was under, but he also reported improvement:

Of the thousands of Hungarian Refugees who have already gone to the United States under the emergency and sponsored by CRS I doubt that more than 200 were really thoroughly interviewed. We simply were not given the time [by the Embassy] to do this… Now, as I said before, and thank God, we can act in a more orderly and sensible manner.65

The CRS staff in Austria, bolstered by colleagues from neighboring countries and volunteers, numbered 225 in locations around the country. The head of the Salzburg office of the CRS reported that the work was “a nightmare of improvisation” and “not entirely free from confusion,” but succeeded thanks to dedication and collaboration with the many other agencies and organizations.66

James Norris wrote that “the sudden Hungarian exodus has constituted the biggest movement of Catholic refugees. Yet Catholic organizations have not been alone in coping with the problem.”67 The ICMC’s Migration News understandably focused on the Catholic organizations, and indeed they had far more staff working directly with the Hungarian refugees than the other religious agencies. A coordinating committee for government, intergovernmental, and voluntary agencies working on the Hungarian refugee crisis met in Geneva seventeen times between 13 November 1956 and 21 October 1957. The minutes reveal strong engagement not only by the CRS and ICMC, but also by Charles Jordan, representing the Standing Conference of Voluntary Agencies Working for Refugees and the JDC, Edgar Chandler, and various representatives of the UNHCR, ICEM, Red Cross, U.S. Escapee Program, CARE, AFSC, and various smaller agencies.68

Recurrent topics in the coordinating committee included the current status of refugee flow into and out of Hungary, the management of the camps by the Red Cross or the Austrian government, and the supply of food and clothing. Both the Catholic agencies and those with fewer staff on the ground in Austria distributed materials collected through their own fundraising efforts as well as those supplied by U.S. government surplus and USEP funds. Within the ACVAFS New York office, the Committee on Migration and Refugee Affairs focused on the movement of people, whereas a separate Ad Hoc Committee on Hungary was dedicated to the supply of material within both Austria and Hungary.69 The Vienna council of the ACVAFS may have met less frequently (there are relatively few minutes in the ACVAFS archives) because it was so busy actually working with the refugees. One topic documented in the records is the division of proceeds from a fundraising effort on behalf of Hungarian youth. One such breakdown was 56 percent for CRS, 21 percent for the Lutheran World Federation/World Council of Churches, 11 percent for AJDC, and 2 percent each for the Brethren Service Commission, the Hungarian Refugee Service, the International Social Service, the World Ort Union, and the YMCA/YWCA.70

Care for the several thousand unaccompanied youth was an increasingly common topic in the committee meetings, especially as the number of Hungarian refugees waned in 1957. The worldwide interest in adopting refugee orphans far outstripped their actual number. The UNHCR, Austrian and Hungarian governments, and the voluntary agencies were all engaged in a discussion about the options for repatriation, resettlement, or settlement in Austria. Many voluntary agencies helped establish group homes and schools for Hungarian young people who resettled in Germany or stayed in Austria.71

Hungarian intelligence analysis of intercepted mail72 reported frequent contacts between the refugees and the clergy in the camps and resettlement communities. Allegations of anti-Communist agitation in these encounters, recruitment into intelligence services, or dissemination of propaganda seem to have been exaggerations. The religious component of these encounters presumed concern for the individual traveler and how he or she might deal with the available choices with the help of a kind word and ready ear, perhaps also with sacraments or prayer. In their committee reports, the WCC and the Catholic agencies emphasized that they had staff who spoke Hungarian and sought out the refugees. On November 23, 1956, Pope Pius named Bishop Stephan László, administrator of the Burgenland province (where most of the refugees entered Austria) and a speaker of Hungarian, as Apostolic Visitor for the Catholic Hungarian refugees in Austria. In this position, László had authority over all Hungarian priests arriving in Austria as refugees and the responsibility of ensuring that priests with knowledge of Hungarian attend to the refugees wherever they were. László published a bulletin in German and another in Hungarian for clergy working with the refugees.73

In the United States, the religious agencies and clergy detailed to Camp Kilmer participated in the processing of refugees, performed religious services, and held weddings. The fifteen members of the President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief in Washington, DC included CRS Director Msgr. Edward Swanson, Charles P. Taft (one of the founders of the WCC), and ACVAFS Chairman Moses A. Leavitt of the JDC. Four of the seven voluntary agencies represented at Camp Kilmer were religious in character: the CRS, CWS, HIAS, and LRS. Camp Kilmer’s operating manual states:

the NCWC often assigns groups of refugees to a given Diocese, which is in turn expected to work out the actual sponsorships locally within the parishes. In all instances, the Sponsoring
Agency is the organization to which the United States Government and the Hungarians look for the finalizing of the resettlement plan, as well as the maintenance of contact.74

Many refugees left the camp in response to invitations from relatives or employers without waiting for religious sponsorship. In all, 32,000 refugees passed through Camp Kilmer before it closed in April, 1957. The religious agencies and at least one Hungarian American organization criticized the decision to channel refugees through Camp Kilmer.75 On 13 November 1956, the CRS invited diocesan resettlement directors to notify the central office if they were ready to receive Hungarians in large quantities, encouraging them to write: “send us a planeload.” A follow-up circular issued on 3 December stated: “We have had dozens of requests for planeloads of refugees for specific cities... We have agreed that all refugees would come to Camp Kilmer where we would group them for transportation to specific destinations.”

According to the Resettlement Newsletter of the CRS, twelve dioceses did receive planeloads, carrying 75-100 people at a time.76 Two Hungarian priests organized the reception of the planeload that landed in Chicago on 13 December and apparently supplied the front page headline in the Chicago Daily Sun-Times: “Isten Hozta a Szabadság Országabá [sic] (Translation from Hungarian: God Brought You to Freedom’s Country.”77 Another paper reported: “A Hungarian refugee broke into a warm smile” at the sight of the headline.78

Conclusion

The history of the reception of Hungarian refugees after the 1956 Revolution has generally been recounted as an impressive success story. The refugees in general were highly educated, and they brought with them youthful ambition. They benefitted from growing economies in the host countries, thus it might seem that they were predestined for success in their new lives. We can ascribe the warm welcome they received in part to the Cold War heroization of freedom fighters and victims of Communist repression. This study suggests that the religious or spiritual message in this welcome must also be considered. Voluntary agencies, their donors, and volunteers were not immune to the political milieu, but they were also motivated by their particular, and indeed widely shared, humanitarian mission.

The collaboration between the bureaucrats and the voluntary agencies was largely successful, despite their at times diverging missions. The resolutely upbeat tone of American government relief managers was at odds with the occasionally tense exchanges between the American officials and voluntary agency representatives. In contrast to the positive note in the promotional materials of the President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief, its chair, Tracy Voorhees, regretted the American decision to phase out large-scale refugee relief in the spring of 1957 in response to declining support for the program in Congress. Fr. Flynn, the director of the CRS office in Vienna, spoke to a meeting of Catholic resettlement directors in New York on February 19, 1957. He painted an alarming picture of overcrowding in Austrian camps, and he lamented the flagging support for the refugees among politicians.79 The demoralizing waits endured by refugees still stranded in the Austrian camps and cases of unemployment in countries of resettlement prompted some refugees to return to Hungary. Voluntary repatriation reached over 20,000 by 1960.80

The ACVAFS published a report in April 1958 that noted various purported shortcomings in the reception of Hungarian refugees, from the federal government’s preference for routing refugees through Camp Kilmer to inadequate attention to humanitarian considerations and inequitable, inconsistent criteria applied in the selection of candidates for resettlement.81 Fr. Flynn had called in his 19 February address for the U.S. government and the UNHCR to act more responsibly. This would indeed occur in the coming years, as both took on a larger share of the initiative and expense of refugee relief. The relative impact of the voluntary agencies would consequently decline, although they continue to exert some influence to the present day.82

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Havasy, Gyula, ed. A magyar katolikusok szenvedései 1944–1989: Havasy Gyula dokumentumgyűjteménye [The sufferings of Hungarian Catholics, 1944–1989: The document collection of Gyula Havasy]. Budapest: n.p., 1990.

Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. New York: Doubleday & Doubleday Company, 1955.

van Heuven Goedhart, GJ. “Address.” In International Catholic Migration Congress organized by the International Catholic Migration Commission, Geneva, and the Central Catholic Emigration Foundation, The Hague. Castle Bouvigne, Breda, Netherlands. September 11–16th 1954. The Hague: Pax, [1954].

Holborn, Louise W. Refugees: A Problem of Our Time: The Work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1951–1972. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1975.

Hollenbach, David, SJ. “Religion and Forced Migration.” In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Jando Sigona, 447–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Horváth, Ibolya et al., eds. Iratok az igazságszolgáltatás történetéhez [Writings on the history of the administration of justice], 2 vols. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1992.

Kecskés, Gusztáv, ed. Egy globális humanitárius akció hétköznapjai: A magyar menekültek segélyezésének szervezésére létrehozott Koordinációs Bizottság összefoglaló jegyzőkönyvei (Genf, 1956. november 13.−1957. október 29.) [Everyday life in a global humanitarian operation: The summary minutes of the Coordination Committee created to organize the provision of help for the Hungarian refugees (Geneva, November 13, 1956 – October 29, 1957)]. Budapest: MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, Budapest, 2017.

Kern, Friedrich. Österreich: Offene Grenze der Menschlichkeit: Die Bewältigung des ungarischen Flüchtlingsproblems im Geiste internationaler Solidarität. Vienna: Verlag des Bundesministeriums für Inneres, 1959.

Kirby, Dianne. “The Churches and Christianity in Cold War Europe.” In A Companion to Europe since 1945, edited by Klaus Larres, 183–207. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Kirby, Dianne. “The Cold War, the Hegemony of the United States, and the Golden Age of Christian Democracy.” In World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000, vol. 9 of The Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Available in Cambridge Histories Online. Accessed January 29, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521815000.017.

Köchler, Hans. “Das Verhältnis von Religion und Politik in Österreich und Europa: Die Idee des säkularen Staates.” Religion und Politik 37 (2013), 5–17. Accessed January 29, 2017. http://www.politischebildung.com/pdfs/37-hk.pdf.

Komoróczy, Géza. A zsidók története Magyarországon [The History of the Jews in Hungary]. Vol. 2: 1849-től a jelenkorig [From 1849 to the present day]. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2012.

Központi Statisztikai Hivatal. 1949. évi népszámlalás. 9. Demográfiai eredmények [The 1949 Census. 9. demographic findings]. Budapest: Állami nyomda, 1950. Pt 2, 12. Accessed January 30, 2017. https://library.hungaricana.hu/hu/view/NEDA_1949_09/?pg=0&layout=s.

“KSH felmérése az 1956-os disszidálásról. Az illegálisan külföldre távozott személyek főbb adatai: 1956. Október 23.–1957. április 30” [The Central Statistics Office assessment of dissidence in 1956: The main data concerning people who fled the country illegally]. Regio: Kisebbségtudományi szemle 2, no. 4 (1991): 174–211.

Kupke, Raymond J. “James J. Norris: An American Catholic Life.” Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1995. Online in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Accessed January 31, 2017.

László, Károly. Napló-töredék az 1849-iki menekülteket, internáltakat, különösen Kossuthot és környözetét illetőleg, Törökországban és az Amerikai Egyesült Államokban [Diary concerning the 1849 refugees, internees, especially Kossuth and his companions]. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1887.

Loescher, Gil. The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Luxmoore, Jonathan, and Jolanta Babiuch. The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999.

Marrus, Michael R. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford, 1985.

Mink, András. “Columbia University Research Project Hungary: 1956 Hungarian Refugee Interviews at OSA Archivum, Budapest.” Accessed May 15, 2017. http://w3.osaarchivum.org/digitalarchive/blinken/curph.pdf.

Murber, Ibolya. “Az 1956-os magyar menekültek Ausztriában: Menekültlét és integráció” [The 1956 Hungarian refugees in Austria: Life as refugee and integration]. Múltunk 26, no. 3 (2016): 123–59.

Nagy, Ernő. Magyar középiskolák Ausztriában 1956 után [Hungarian high schools in Austria after 1956]. Budapest: World Federation of Hungarians, 1998.

Nichols, J. Bruce. The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee Work, and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Niessen, James P. “A befogadás kultúrája és az 1957. januári osztrák menekültkvóta-indítvány” [The culture of welcome and the January 1957 Austrian refugee quota proposal]. Világtörténet 6 (38), no. 3 (2016): 337–56. Accessed May 15, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3M90BX1.

Niessen, James P. “Hungarian Refugees of 1956: From the Border to Austria, Camp Kilmer, and Elsewhere.” Hungarian Cultural Studies: e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association (AHEA), 9 (2016): 122–36. Accessed May 15, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2016.261.

Pastor, Peter. “The American Reception and Settlement of Hungarian Refugees in 1956–1957.” Hungarian Cultural Studies: e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association (AHEA), 9 (2016): 197–205. Accessed May 15, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2016.255.

Porter, Stephen R. Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief. Joyce Kilmer Reception Center: Manual of Policies and Procedures followed in Conjunction with Hungarian Refugee Resettlement. 201-page typescript. Accessed May 15, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3ZC827K.

Public Papers of the United States Presidents, William J. Clinton. Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2000. Vol. 1. Accessed May 15, 2017. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-1999-book1/pdf/PPP-1999-book1-doc-pg903-2.pdf.

Rásky, Béla. “‘Flüchtlinge haben auch auch Pflichten’: Österreich und die Ungarnflüchtlinge 1956.” Presentation in Budapest, October 12, 1998. http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/beitr/fallstudie/BRasky1.pdf. Accessed February 5, 2017.

Reiss, Elizabeth Clark. ACVAFS: Four Monographs. New York: The American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, 1985.

Rusch, ed. Bischof Paul. Der Sozialhirtenbrief der österreichischen Bischöfe. Innsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag, 1957.

Stark, Tamás. Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939–1949: A Statistical Review. Boulder: East European Monographs, 2000.

Tessarolo, Rev. Giulivo, ed. Exsul Familia: The Church’s Magna Carta for Migrants. Staten Island, NY: St. Charles Seminary, 1962.

Világtörténet 6 (38), no. 3 (2016). Thematic issue on 1956.

Wycislo, Msgr. Aloysius J. “Escape to America.” Catholic World 93, no. 2 (1957): 326–27.

Figure 1. U.S. Army Official Photographs from 1956 preserved in the National Archives and Records Administration. In the public domain; from the 1956 refugee collection of the Blinken OSA Archivum. Accessed October 5, 2017. http://www.refugees1956.org/2017/01/21/1956-hungarian-refugees-in-the-us-photo-gallery/.

Figure 2. Fr. László Szépe to the Catholic Committee for Refugees in New York, 1949, with an appeal for assistance for Hungarian refugees in Austria from Caritas Hungarica in Austria. Source: Center for Migration Studies. 024. NCWC—Department of Immigration—New York Office and NCWC Catholic Committee for Refugees. Records. General Correspondence. Box 21/31. Reprinted with the permission of the Center for Migration Studies of New York.

Figure 3. “Send us a planeload”: The 21 December 1956 issue of the CRS’s Resettlement Newsletter depicts planeloads of people arriving in Detroit and Chicago. CMS 023b. Bureau of Immigration, Box 153. Folder 4857. Hungarians, pt. 2. Reprinted with the permission of the Center for Migration Studies of New York.

 

 

A Foreign Labor Force in Early Republican Turkey: The Case of Hungarian Migrant Workers1

Emre Saral

Atatürk Institute, Hacettepe University, Ankara

Beginning in the 1920s, Hungarian workers began to migrate to foreign countries for economic and political reasons. Among them, a group of Hungarians including workers, engineers, and trained experts arrived in Turkey. The laborers from Hungary entered the Turkish market before the Residence Convention signed in 1926, which mutually allowed the citizens of both signatories to reside and work in the two countries. As neither government initially implemented the necessary measures, there had been an uncontrolled flow of workers to Turkey. Enduring poor living conditions and facing several problems, including low wages and lack of social insurance, they were employed in jobs such as house building and railroad construction, and they made a serious contribution to the development of the country in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay presents the situation of the Hungarian migrant workers in Turkey in the interwar period on the basis of official documents held in Hungarian, Turkish, and British archives. I examine the socio-economic situation of Hungarians in Anatolia, the obstacles they faced, the stance of and measures adopted by the Turkish government, and the attempts that were made by the Hungarian diplomatic mission on behalf of the Hungarian citizens living in Turkey.

Keywords: Foreign labor force, Hungarians in Turkey, workers, Turkish–Hungarian relations in the interwar period

Introduction

The harsh terms of the Treaty of Trianon negatively affected the Hungarian economy and the labor market. Many of the members of the new Hungarian minority communities in the neighboring states relocated to Trianon Hungary, and this raised the unemployment rate. Political instability and increasing military production during the many conflicts and armed struggles that broke out in the wake of the war triggered inflation. Real wages also fell. The real wage of an officer at the time of the outbreak of the war had fallen by 67 percent by the end of 1918. In the same period, farming wages dropped by 54 percent and factory workers’ wages by 47 percent.2 Economic problems in Hungary in the aftermath of World War I caught the notice of Turkish public opinion. In an official magazine on Turkey’s foreign affairs in the 1930s, the contention was made that the cease of the flow of seasonal workers from Czechoslovakia to the Hungarian plain in the summertime to work the arable lands had negatively affected the economies of both countries.3

The idea of emigrating appealed to unemployed Hungarians who had to struggle with the effects of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon: “Countries that have more population than capital export people as agricultural laborers. The migrants, like village or urban workers, go abroad for almost no money, and they seek countries wealthier than their homelands and at least as expensive as their livelihoods.”4 Hungarians migrated to a variety of countries, including Germany, France, the USA, Canada, Brazil, Norway, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Approximately 40,000 Hungarians went abroad between 1921 and 1924 and 35,000 between 1925 and 1931.5 Meanwhile, between 1918 and 1924, some 426,000 refugees relocated to Hungary.6

The population of Turkey according to the 1927 census was 13,649,945, of which 6,584,404 were males and 7,065,541 were females.7 If one takes the area of the country (roughly 900,000 km2) into account, it is clear that, given its comparatively low population density, Turkey had a strong need for a labor force and one would not expect high levels of unemployment. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate according to the 1927 census was 39.3 percent.8 Furthermore, non-Muslims in Anatolia left Turkey because of the wars in 1913–23 (they either fled or were deported or expelled). This demographic exchange ended with an agreement between Turkey and Greece held at the Lausanne Conference in 1923. As a consequence of these developments, there was a decline in skilled labor in Turkey in the early 1920s. The 1927 census shows that non-Muslim citizens in Turkey constituted 2.6 percent of the total population.9 Before the war, this rate was around 20 percent10 This is one of the reasons why a huge gap appeared in the Turkish economy.11 There was a lack of skilled workers in professions that required mastery. Thus, in the early republican period, the organization and development of Kemalist Turkey was intended to be based in part on the employment of foreign experts, workers, technicians, and engineers from various professions in order to gain momentum in every sphere of socioeconomic life.12 The Turkish government attempted to take precautions to support the native labor force.13 However, as these attempts would yield results only in the long term, priority was given to the employment of foreign workers and experts in order to come up with radical and quick solutions to Turkish modernization.

When mutual economic relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are examined from the perspective of the labor force, it can be observed that experts from Hungary were employed in Turkey in fields such as forestry, agriculture, veterinary care, and industry.14 There were also attempts to collaborate on railway transportation.15 Hungarians were also employed in mining and mine operations in Anatolia.16 Students were sent to Hungary to learn new agricultural and industrial methods.17

These collaborative efforts were maintained during the interwar period. Hungarians who sought opportunities abroad quickly discovered the potential of Turkey in an economic transformation. On the one hand, the Hungarian authorities and entrepreneurs aimed to supply raw materials, find jobs for thousands of unemployed Hungarian citizens, and find a trade partner for Hungary’s agricultural products. Moreover, Hungary aimed to supply plants in order to make its dismantled factories from the Habsburg period functional again.18 On the other hand, Turkey sought ways to strengthen its recently established economy, address the deficit in its labor market, and continue to benefit from Hungarian labor. These nascent countries had different socio-economic dynamics and structures, in part because one had been part of the Habsburg Empire and one had been the center of the Ottoman Empire.19 The deeper their economic relations became, the more complex and unfamiliar the problems they faced.

Hungarians played a crucial role in the modernization of the recently established Turkish republic. Various experts, such as engineers and architects with higher education degrees, made serious contributions to the reforms of Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey. For instance, Antal Réthly established the modern Turkish meteorological service;20 turcologist Gyula Mészáros founded ethnographical museum in Ankara;21 László Rásonyi, another turcologist, was the first lecturer at the Institute of Hungarology in Ankara;22 engineer György Tittes built the infrastructural facilities of various Anatolian cities;23 engineer János György was appointed chief director of Kemal Atatürk’s farm;24 János Máthe was the gardener for Kemal Atatürk’s house;25 Oszkár Wellman was the agricultural engineer who introduced his Turkish colleagues to new breeding methods;26 the landscape architect Imre Ormos did landscapeing in the new capital, Ankara; histologist Tibor Péterfi27 had many outstanding achievements.28

This essay adds to the extensive literature concerning the activities and contributions of Hungarian technical experts and intellectuals to the modernization of Turkey by focusing on a little known aspect of Turkish–Hungarian relations in the twentieth century. Specifically, I offer an analysis of the foreign manpower of Hungarian origin on the Turkish labor market in the 1920s and 1930s. Hungarian migrants arrived in Turkey and worked there as qualified laborers in various sectors. My essay examines the socioeconomic situation of the Hungarians in Turkey, how the new Turkish nation state handled the foreign labor, the challenges that Hungarians faced, and how the Hungarian legation in Turkey responded to these challenges. I draw on documents found primarily in Hungarian and Turkish archives, though I also use relevant documents held in the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom. My article sheds light on the migration history of both nations with an informative and descriptive approach rather than a theoretical and methodological framework.

The Arrival of Hungarian Manpower on the Turkish Labor Market

The foreign labor force in Turkey consisted not only of Hungarians, but of people of many national backgrounds. There were still non-Turkish workers who had been working for foreign companies in Turkey since the Ottoman period. Despite several challenges and serious unresolved problems between Turkey and Greece throughout the 1920s, Greek citizens were still working in Turkey. A group of White Russians took refuge in Turkey right after the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution and became actors on the Turkish market.29 During the political turmoil in the first half of 1920s, citizens of Balkan countries such as Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (primarily Serbs), and Albania also arrived in Turkey.30 German and Austrian workers also came to Turkey. The Hungarian colony did not unquestionably form the largest migrant labor community in Turkey. According to the 1927 and 1935 censuses, the distribution of the population was as follows:

Countries	1927 Census	1935 Census
Turkey	13,542,795	16,103,904
Hungary	1,830	1,078
Albania	1,652	1,349
Britain	3,413	2,802
Austria	1,435	1,057
Belgium	258	205
Bulgaria	7,448	2,599
France	3,427	2,017
Greece	26,431	17,642
Germany	2,306	2,151
Italy	11,573	756
Poland	6,13	520
Romania	1,530	729
Russia	6,206	162
Serbia	3,883	307
Czechoslovakia	*	723
Europe (other) Asian & African countries Miscellaneous & unknown	2,891 10,373 1,424
Total Number of Foreigners	72,005	34,097

Table 1. Official Statistics on foreign citizens living in Turkey31

Hungarian workers who came to Turkey worked in construction jobs through various contractors.32 It is claimed that some 100 workers of Hungarian origin worked in Ankara and its surroundings by mid-1925.33 They were employed in construction projects such as home building, city sewerage, pavement, water networks, electricity, lighting, etc. They were also employed in the construction of the Ankara–Sivas railway line and construction around the Izmir province.34 Some 300 people with training and experience in construction went to Turkey from the Tolna County in southern Hungary (and in particular Bátaszék, one of the larger cities in the Tolna County).35

According to Hungarian deputy Imre Szabó, there were 800 Hungarian workers in Turkey.36 Camille Jacquart, a French demographer, contends that there were 619 Hungarian citizens in Turkey in 1927.37 According to a report of the Turan Society on the development of economic relations between Turkey and Hungary in 1928 there were 4,000-5,000 Hungarian workers living in Turkey.38 In an embassy report dated 1 February 1927, the number of Hungarians living in the embassy’s area of responsibility was approximately 1,200. This report asserts that a flow of 300-400 Hungarians came to Turkey in the previous year, though the same number of Hungarians returned to their homeland.39 János Vendel, a Jesuit pastor serving in Turkey, arrived at the exaggerated figure of approximately 15,000. He observed that around 1,000-1,100 of them were Catholics who were living in Ankara and its surroundings.40 No official data have been given on the share of foreign citizens on the Turkish labor market due to unregistered employment and inadequate local control mechanisms. However, the official data on the total population of Hungarians in Turkey given by the government is as follows:41

1927 Census			1935 Census			1945 Census
Women	Men	Total	Women	Men	Total	Women	Men	Total
599	1231	1830	490	588	1078	290	318	608

Table 2. Hungarian citizens living in Turkey42

Turkish decision-makers were eager to provide employment opportunities for skilled Hungarian workers. In his interview with the Hungarian newspaper Világ, Ahmed Riza Bey, the representative delegate of the Ankara government in Paris, stated that they would be pleased to benefit from the art and literature of the Hungarian nation and emphasized their need for Hungarian engineers and experts.43As a matter of fact, Ali Haydar Bey, the Mayor of Ankara, paid a five-day of inspection visit to Budapest in 1924 with the intention of “taking some fifty Hungarian artisans to Ankara, where they will help facilitate the reconstruction of the city and the emergence of the institutions.” Haydar Bey also added that they would learn a lot from the Hungarians and benefit from their well-developed industry.44

A remarkable factor that influenced Turkish resolution to bring members of the Hungarian labor force to Turkey was a political one. In the eyes of Turkish authorities, Hungary was an ideal choice as a former ally which would not be an anti-Turkish position. As citizens of a successor of an empire which was economically dependent on the great powers through capitulations, decision-makers of the nascent state turned to nations which had, in the words of Sir George R. Clerk, the British ambassador to Turkey, “vast numbers of economically useful and politically harmless” people.45 This refers simply to nations that would neither be expected to seek further political concessions from Turkey nor to get involved in political activities against it. The Turks would have probably taken into consideration the fact that Hungary, which had recently lost two thirds of its territory and was in socioeconomic turmoil, internationally isolated, and sympathetic towards the Turks, could hardly pose any threat to Turkey’s political or economic interests. In this respect, the unfavorable reaction of Ismet Pasha’s (İnönü), the foreign minister, to the speech given by Hüsrev Bey (Gerede), the Turkish envoy to Budapest, to Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian regent, could be regarded as a sign of how the Turks attached importance to the principle of political and economic independence. Following Hüsrev Bey’s presentation of his letter of credence, the Hungarian leader expressed his opinion that Hungary had a stalwart support of Turkey and would help it in its efforts to approach the prosperity of European civilization. The Turkish diplomat said that he was grateful to the Hungarian regent for his kind words. Ismet Pasha ordered the envoy not to give any approval for such gestures, since “in political relations an envoy should refrain from accepting or confirming such assertions of expertise and scientific affairs, as it would diminish the country’s political credibility.”46

Parallel to this, the Turkish authorities did not want the foreign citizens to form colonies within the Turkish territories. In this respect, the request of a group of 120 Hungarian farmers to establish a village was rejected by the Turkish government, since foreign citizens were prohibited from creating settlements within the territories of the Republic of Turkey.47 Meanwhile Numan Bey (Menemencioğlu), the Turkish chargé d’affaires to Budapest, called to the attention of a delegate of the prestigious Turanian Society that the Hungarian workers in Turkey were expected to serve in Turkey and to abstain from any effort to establish a colony.48 The negative experiences of the Ottoman period shaped this Turkish policy, whereas the Hungarian authorities drew a more pragmatic picture on mutual economic relations: “Should [the Turks] trust foreigners in the construction of railways and factories, then they must tolerate skilled workers in the absence of a Turkish labor force and foreigners in professions that require expertise.”49

Challenges Faced by the Hungarian Migrant Workers in Turkey

A letter from 1925 written by Boldizsár Beck, the representative of Société Anonyme Turque d’Etudes et d’Enterprises Urbaines, a Turco–German joint company, offers a description of the living conditions of the Hungarian workers.50 The letter was addressed to Jakab Klein and Ádám Schmidt from the Hungarian village of Csibrák. Klein and Schmidt had been invited to Ankara to work as skilled laborers. Beck claimed that no diploma was required to work as a bricklayer. He added that in the case of a ten-day-work period, with a daily wage of 5 liras, it would be possible to cover all of the travel expenses to Ankara, including the visa fee, and it would be possible to set aside money in a settlement in which little money was spent.51

It appears that Beck painted a very encouraging picture. However, he may well have been exaggerating in order to attract masses of workers. Indeed, according to the official statistics, the daily average cost of living for a person in Ankara between 1923 and 1925 was 13 or 14 liras, which was equivalent to the national average cost of living.52 Jenő Ruszkay, the commercial attaché, drew a more realistic picture of daily expenditures than Beck. In his report, the Hungarian official described daily life in Ankara as a camp for an ordinary European man in the beginning of 1923. On the basis of his personal experiences, Ruszkay set the daily cost of living at 17 or 18 liras (approx. 1,700 Hungarian crown). The costs which should be covered with this sum were the following: housing: 2.5 liras (a better facility could be rented for 5); heating: 2 liras; meals: 3 liras; transportation (if necessary): 3-4 liras; and tips and various expenditures: 4-5 liras.53 In light of Ruszkay’s report, Beck’s optimistic calculations hardly seem plausible. Therefore, it could be claimed that it was not possible to lead a comfortable life with a daily wage of 5 liras with these living expenses. As a matter of fact, Hungarian workers faced serious challenges in Turkey. In 1925, Tibor Pőzel, the representative of the Hungarian legation in Ankara, described these challenges: inadequate daily wages; the harsh climate of Anatolia; summer diseases, such as malaria; no work due to the cessation of construction in the winter; accommodation in adobe houses and unhygienic places; and finally, the lack of a labor union which would protect the interests of the workers.54

Other factors also worsened the situation of workers. First, legal and institutional deficiencies negatively affected their prospects and the conditions in which they lived. Diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Republic of Turkey officially began with the Treaty of Friendship signed on December 18, 1923.55 The second legal arrangement between the parties was the Residence Convention of December 8, 1925, which was signed in accordance with the third article of the treaty of friendship, which obliged the parties to make necessary arrangements allowing their citizens mutual rights to travel and reside in each country. This convention could be regarded as the legal guarantee of the free movement of the Hungarian labor force in Turkey. Since the abolition of economic concessions, known as the capitulations, by the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923), which had applied to foreigners in the Ottoman period, Hungarian citizens in Turkey had been deprived of legal guarantees. The aforementioned convention was consolidated on December 20, 1926 and came into force both in Turkey and Hungary in mid-1927.56 However, Hungarian workers entered the Turkish market in 1924, before the residence convention had been implemented. Thus, the laborers worked in Turkey for almost three years without any legal assurances.

In the session of the Hungarian parliament on October 23, 1926, problems faced by Hungarian workers in Turkey became a subject of discussion. Deputy Imre Szabó made a motion with his assertion that the living conditions of the workers had deteriorated. In his motion, the Hungarian deputy, who criticized the government for not supporting its citizens abroad who were suffering from poverty, posed a question to Lajos Walko, the foreign minister, as to whether or not the government would take necessary measures for possible repatriation.57 A few months later, during the session concerning the ratification of the Turco–Hungarian Residence Convention of 1926, Deputy Géza Malasits, referring to Szabó’s motion, indicated that he was in favor of the convention, which would help settle the problems faced by Hungarians who were unable to get their money and lived under worse conditions.58 During the session, speaker István Görgey, who introduced the draft law, emphasized the lack of legal guarantees for the Hungarian citizens living in Turkey since the abolition of the capitulations. Thus, this agreement aimed to obtain concessions in favor of Hungarian citizens, such as freedom of residence and movement, right to property ownership, and equity in taxation.59 In reply to Szabó’s motion, Walko informed the deputies that the government gave assistance to workers who wanted to return to Hungary or let them work in the Danube Steam Ship Company. Walko argued that workers who were unable to get their wages avoided consulting the Hungarian legation for some reason: „If we knew where they were working, it would be easier to provide them assistance.”60

Second, the absence of a coordinative organ, either separate or joint, that would settle the worker flow also negatively affected the conditions in which the workers lived.. In terms of social policy and labor, a limited population, weak industry, and a weak economy which relied on primitive agrarian society set the framework of the social conditions in the new Turkish state. Turkish decision-makers searched for new methods, including encouraging private entrepreneurship and liberalism to foster economic growth and development. Therefore, beginning in the 1920s, the government attempted to determine the fundamentals of labor relations. Labor law, which regulated these relations, came into force in Turkey in 1936. Although some arrangements had been made concerning workers’ vacation and holidays and the sanitary issues faced by working women and children, there had been no comprehensive regulations concerning the labor until then.61 Talas identified factors such as problems in the functioning of the democratic institutions of the state, an economy with an agricultural society and weak industry, a small working class, the Great Depression, and intolerance of left-wing ideas as reasons for this slow pace of progress.62

Under these circumstances, there was no institution that would make arrangements for foreign labor or handle the problems of foreign workers in Turkey. As a matter of fact, due to the absence of an institution that would check the eligibility of the workers going abroad, regardless of their qualification, every worker who wished to go to Turkey constituted an obstacle to a possible increase in the living standards of Hungarian workers in their host country. In 1923, the Dutch Legation in Istanbul, which provided consular protection to the citizens of Hungary in Turkey, sent a note to the Turkish Foreign Ministry regarding the uncontrollable flow of Hungarian masses to Turkey. They contended that the Turkish legation in Budapest encouraged unemployed Hungarians to go to Turkey regardless of their qualifications or skills. This was why the Dutch consulate urged the Turkish authorities to take the necessary measures in order to stop the flow.63

The absence of such an organ of oversight put the entire burden on the Hungarian legation in Turkey. The Hungarian legation in Ankara addressed the workers’ problems. For instance, citizens from Bátaszék wrote a petition to Hungarian authorities concerning eleven building masters and Mihály Lasko, their foreman in the Turkish town of Bozuyük. As soon as they received bad news from their countrymen in Turkey, they sought assistance from the legation. Répási, the attaché, unable to get in touch with Lasko, was informed that the latter had been unable to pay his workers and had disappeared.64 Furthermore, the embassy sought jobs for its citizens. Hungarian authorities received information on the employment opportunities at the Ankara–Sivas railway construction project, and they lobbied Swedish and Belgian contractors in an attempt to prevail on them to provide employment for Hungarian workers in the undertaking.65

Turkish intolerance of left-wing ideas and, particularly, communism was also an important factor. Given the poor living conditions, the workers’ inability to get full wages, the absence of any guarantee of employment or social facilities that would provide gathering places for the Hungarian community (such as churches, schools, etc.), communist ideas began to spread among Hungarian workers in Turkey.66 Clerk expressed his views in his annual report of 1927. In his assessment, the immediate preoccupation of László Tahy, the Hungarian envoy to Turkey, was “the necessity of preventing Hungarian workmen from coming to Turkey, because those already in Angora seemingly been won over to Communism by propaganda put about by the Soviet embassy, and in consequence, to be sent back to their native land under escort.”67 Tahy convinced Tevfik Rüştü Bey (Aras), Turkish foreign minister, of the premise that, in his own words, “communism spreading among Hungarian workers would be a threat for Turkey as well.”68 Kemalists actually regarded communists as a threat to the social model they sought to build, which was predicated on the emergence of an integrated society without any class distinction.69 This is why the Turkish authorities arrested roughly two hundred Hungarian workers. Some of them were immediately deported, and the rest were given a period of one month to leave the country.70

There is no evidence indicating that the Hungarian communists had any direct contact with their Turkish comrades or intended to spread their ideology in Turkey. Dilaver Bey, the chief of police in Ankara province, informed Tahy that in the light of their interrogation, the main goal of the Hungarian communists was to get their comrades in Ankara back to Hungary illegally.71 According to the indictment issued by the Turkish security officials, the communists, who were unable to maneuver easily in their homeland, were able to organize their activities under Cell No. 10 of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSzMP).72 The head of this hierarchical organization was László Mihályfalvi, and the cell had meetings in Lajos Debreczeni’s home in Ankara twice a week. The first task of this organization had been the distribution of magazines entitled Magyar Munkás (“Hungarian Worker”), which was printed in Paris, Az Ember (“Man”), which was printed in the United States, and Új Előre (“Onward Anew”).73 According to the police report, this cell got orders directly from Hungary, and when Kummer’s house was searched, one of the cell members, stamps, member identification cards and lists, forms, and relevant documents were found.74 Workers accused of spreading communist propaganda with the backing of the Soviet embassy in Ankara could not simply be dismissed en masse from the country. The construction of the city had slowly been progressing, and there had been a dearth of skilled workers on the labor market.75 The fact that in 1928, 47 communists from among the accused were expelled with their families to the Soviet Union could have been the consequence of the lobbying activity of the Soviet legation (the Soviet Union was a close ally of Turkey at the time).76

The elimination of the communist threat did not settle all of the problems among the Hungarian workers. One of the repercussions of the communist propaganda was the dramatic increase in prejudice against foreigners. Communists who were able to stay in Turkey and other Hungarians who had no contact with the accused groups were both negatively affected by these developments. As Turkish police began to follow them, employers became reluctant to employ Hungarians. Moreover, as Turkish workers were unable to reach the living standards and acquire the rights of their European counterparts thanks to the long-lasting struggles, the wages of Turkish skilled workers remained very low in the early 1920s. In contrast, foreign workers and skilled laborers who came to Turkey entered the market with high wages. However, the economic crises triggered a general tendency among employers to hire locals instead of foreigners, and this caused a significant decrease in the wages of the Hungarian skilled workers in the construction sector. Beginning in 1932, several Hungarian workers began to leave Turkey because of the preference among employers for hiring locals, the aforementioned decrease in wages, and high taxes.77According to an embassy report of 1932, the annual average wages of Hungarian skilled workers was as follows:78

 

(Lira / year)	1925–26	1926–27	1927–28	1928–29	1930	1931	1932
Carpenter	7	6	6	5.5	5	4,5	4
Fitter	5	4	3	3	2.5	2	2
Bricklayer	7	5.5	5	5	5	4	3
Sawyer	7	5.5	5	5	5	5	3

Table 3. Wages of Hungarian skilled workers

The influence of the Great Depression of 1929 on Turkey affected the labor market as well. The rising unemployment rate prompted the government to take strict measures. In the National Industrial Congress of 1930, the Turkish intolerance of the foreign workers became an issue of debate. The Congress recommended that the employers would no longer hire workers and skilled laborers who were unable to find jobs in their home countries. Moreover, employers were advised to insist that migrant workers present the necessary papers and favor Turkish workers in seasonal jobs.79 The Ministry of Interior declared that it had passed a decree to prevent foreigners from loitering in the Turkish streets without money or a job. According to this decree, foreign citizens who wished to reside in Turkey had to show at least 400 liras at the border check. For people who wished simply to travel through Turkey, this amount was set at 250 liras. Otherwise, foreign visitors were not allowed to enter the country.80 The 1931 program of the Republican People’s Party, the ruling party, also put emphasis on the issue. According to this platform, “the interests of the nationalist Turkish workers are going to be taken into consideration.”81

The roots of economic nationalism in Turkish society go back to the eve of World War I. The Union and Progress Party, which ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war, aimed to strengthen the “national economy” and create a “national bourgeoisie.” In their assessment, this would be possible only with the erosion of non-Muslim economic hegemony. Thus, particular emphasis was put on the “national” aspect of economic life, and foreigners and minorities began to be presented as exploiters of the national economy.82

In this respect, in the beginning of 1932, a draft law concerning the prohibition of foreign workers from certain professions was prepared by the Turkish authorities. This was the fourth reason why the situation of the Hungarian workers worsened in Turkey. According to the law, foreign citizens were prohibited from having a shop or pursuing a profession anywhere but in the major towns. In these towns, they were not allowed to be artisans, itinerant dealers, gardeners, musicians, printers, toy manufacturers, journalists, typographers, newsboys, brokers or agents, dealers in monopoly goods, guides, auctioneers, car-drivers, workmen of all categories, porters, servants, bar-artists, physicians, veterinary surgeons, chemists, dentists, engineers, or lawyers. Foreigners whom the new law affected were allowed to continue practicing their professions for a specified period of time and in the end had to give them up within three years’, by May 1935 the latest. This draft was passed by the parliament and came into force on June 16, 1932.83

Hungarian workers were not the only people negatively affected by the law. It also had consequences for British citizens who were working in İzmir and its surroundings. According to an embassy report, the number of British citizens in Turkey, including wives and families, was roughly 3,500.84 according to a consular report, roughly 53 percent of the total number of British citizens engaged in professional, commercial, and industrial pursuits in İzmir was likely to be affected by law.85 Another consular report from Istanbul dated 1933 noted that within the British colony, the UK citizens of Maltese origin (around 1,200 people) were significantly affected by the law.86 The report also mentioned that Italian and Greek colonies were confronted with the same problem. There were plans to transfer between 8,000 and 10,000 Italian citizens to Pontine Marshes, Italy, where the Greek government was inclined to treat the Greek citizens (of whom there were some 25,000) as refugees.87 The Observer, a British newspaper, drew attention to the issue. According to the news, Greeks, who formed the largest foreign community in Turkey were expected to be the most affected by the arrangement.88 They were especially good at handicrafts, and they were found in larger numbers in most of the professions included in the new bill. The article also mentioned Russian refugees as another group who would also suffer from the new measures, as they were principally chauffeurs, toy manufacturers, artists, and service providers in bars.89

The law complied with the government policy based on economic nationalism in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929. From the Hungarian point of view, the law clashed with Article 4 of the Residence Convention of 1926, which allowed the citizens of either country to work in the other.90 However, the Turkish authorities did not take this into account. Şükrü Kaya, the interior minister, defended the draft law by referring to the economic obligations of the state to its citizenry. He argued that proportionally very few foreigners actually worked in the professions listed in the draft law, and thus very few people would actually be affected. He also claimed that the draft law was not intended to prohibit the employment of the foreigners, but merely to create a control mechanism. Thus, it would actually not be against the interests of the foreign labor force.91

Tahy immediately started lobbying against the bill before the Turkish authorities. First, he drew the attention of the relevant Hungarian authorities in Budapest to the possible negative effects of the implementation of the law on Hungarians working in Turkey, such as waiters and drivers. He claimed that it would not be possible for Hungarians in Turkey to work in professions and services such as stone mastery, plumbing, carpentry, or the service industry if the draft law was passed (and he was correct).92

As Tahy foresaw, the protectionist measures taken by the Turkish government negatively affected foreign workers. The law had repercussions in Hungary as well. Governmental bodies, including the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Interior, and the Chambers of Trade and Commerce, contacted the Foreign Ministry to request consultations.93 Tahy made every effort to convince the Turkish authorities to postpone implementation of the law. He lobbied among leading Turkish political figures and the statesmen at the drafting stage of the law in an effort to obtain possible concessions for Hungarians. Both the minister of the interior and the foreign minister told Tahy that the law was a response to public pressure caused by high unemployment rates and the economic crisis.94 Tahy believed that the exclusion of Hungarians from certain professions in Turkey would also put a burden on the Hungarian economy, and his efforts seem to have had some effect, because the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs proposed an amendment to the law concerning the extension of the deadline to cease working in the professions listed from three months to one year.95 According to an amendment passed on 31 May 1933, the deadline was extended for two more years, which made the deadline 21 May 1935.96 Finally, in accordance with a cabinet decision on 10 May 1934, the law was fully implemented.97

Tahy claimed that the Turkish authorities gave him an oral assurance concerning the situation of Hungarians working as qualified bricklayers, locksmiths, painters, and so forth. They would be allowed to continue working, as the law would not include these professions.98 Tahy shared his opinion with his British counterpart, Clerk. The latter wrote the following:

My Hungarian colleague is quite happy about the law, for his nationals are nearly all employed in the building trade as foreman and so on and will therefore be entered as ‘specialists’ and allowed to remain, while those of lower grades have already found life in Turkey too difficult and have gone, or are going, in large numbers to Persia, where, for reasons best known to themselves, they imagine that they will find good and lucrative employment.99

However, his initial optimism was followed by futile diplomatic efforts with the Turkish authorities. Hungarian officials also relied on this argument in their later lobbying activities. Kálmán Kánya, the Hungarian foreign minister, even ordered Mihály Jungerth-Arnóthy, Tahy’s successor in Ankara, to provide written assurance from the Turkish authorities regarding the issue.100 However, in the final draft no such distinction was drawn. Though the Hungarian authorities reiterated this assurance several times to the Turkish side during the talks, their efforts seem to have had little effect on the latter’s decision. As Jungerth brought the issue before Şükrü Kaya, the Interior Minister, Kaya ended the dialogue by criticizing Tahy for his possible misunderstanding: “Monsieur Tahy might have understood my explanation in a quite broad sense, in a sense that even opposed to the entire law, and this is impossible…”101

From early 1935, long negotiations were held between the Hungarian diplomats in Turkey and Turkish authorities concerning the situation of Hungarians, which would be affected by the law. As a consequence of these negotiations, Jungerth and Cevad Acikalın, the head of the relevant department at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, agreed that Hungarians who would declare proof of mastery of their profession would be allowed by the Ministry of Economy to continue working after the deadline.102

Ullein-Reviczky, the head-consul in Istanbul, regularly reported on the situation of Hungarian workers. In his opinion, the Ministry of Interior should have been informed of the issue, which in the eyes of the Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Economy seemed settled, since local security authorities in the small towns of Anatolia would prevent the Hungarians from continuing to pursue their occupations.103 As a matter of fact, Hungarians who began to receive notifications obliging them to give up their professions by May 20, 1935 sought assistance from the Hungarian embassy.104 Within this period, 114 Hungarian workers submitted applications to the Turkish Ministry of Economy for an extension of their work permit.105 However, among the Hungarians, only workers who had training in plumbing and central heating were allowed to continue working after the deadline of May 21, 1935. Apart from them, among the professions including carpenters and house construction workers, only people who worked either for the government or for influential potentates were able to continue working and earn a living.106

An Embassy report indicates that as of January 31, 1935, the total number of Hungarians living in Turkey was around 1,200: 607 in Ankara, 350 in Istanbul, and 250-300 in Anatolia.107 By early 1936, only 200-300 Hungarian workers remained in Turkey. They were either people who had been directly authorized by the cabinet decision or people who had become Turkish citizens. The workers who were authorized by the cabinet decision to remain were offered contracts as experts in various government institutions. The number of such experts who went Turkey between 1936 and 1950 is 157.108 Some of the people who left were repatriated,109 and the rest attempted in large numbers to try their luck in countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the territory of Palestine, where they hoped to find lucrative employment.110

Conclusion

Following the proclamation of the republic in Turkey on October 29, 1923, the main problem concerning the population of the country was a dearth in the labor force of people with the training necessary in order to exploit the resources and maintain and develop industry, not only in agriculture in the fertile part of the country with large arable lands but also in other professions. During World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, many artisans and craftsmen of Greek and Armenian origin left the country (they fled or were expelled or were subjects of population exchange). This led to a deficit in the labor force of the country, a problem which was to be settled by the importation of a foreign labor force for the short term. The foreign labor force on the Turkish market gradually began to diminish between 1932 and 1935, parallel to the rise of nationalism. The effects of the Great Depression also contributed to the emergence of more nationalist attitudes and, in response, government policies. Thus, the Turkish government made legal arrangements according to which only Turkish nationals were allowed to work in some professions.

Hungarian workers escaped unemployment and political turmoil in their country by seeking refuge in Turkey, where they hoped to find safe haven. However, in general, their story did not have a happy ending. Most of them were unable to get accustomed to the living conditions in Anatolia, secure a decent, reliable living and were obliged to leave the country within a short period of time. The factors that influenced their fates can be summarized as 1) inadequate legal arrangements and institutions; 2) the spread of communist ideology among workers and the negative perceptions it created about the workers in Turkish society; and 3) economic measures taken by Turkish government in response to increasingly nationalistic attitudes in Turkish society. First, the residence agreement was signed by the two governments only three years after the first group of Hungarian workers arrived in Turkey. Thus, the laborers worked without any legal protections. Second, both parties were incapable of establishing a mechanism that could control the migrant flow to Turkey. As a result, workers struggled with difficult challenges. Some of them did not hesitate to get in touch with official organs, such as the Hungarian legation in the hopes of finding redress for their griefs. The fundamental problem they faced was bad living and working conditions in Anatolia. Their dissatisfaction led to the spread of communist propaganda among a small group in the colony. The communists saw Anatolia as a convenient place for the spread of their ideology among workers who were displeased with their situation. However, this made the situation worse for almost the entire colony. The Turkish government was strongly opposed to communist ideology, and so, between 1925 and 1927, a witch hunt was started for Turkish and non-Turkish (including Hungarian) communists. There is no evidence of collaboration between Hungarian and Turkish communist groups. The Hungarian communists sought to spread their ideology in Hungary, not Turkey. On the contrary, Hungarian diplomats lobbied their Turkish counterparts to dismiss any communist agitation in their homeland. This is for the fact that, Hungarian communists were taken into custody and expelled from the country in 1927. The rest who remained in Turkey were strictly monitored by the authorities, and they faced mistrust in professional circles. In the meantime, as their daily wages began to decrease, the workers gradually left the country for other destinations.

In the meantime, the Turkish government had already decided to transform its economic policy into a centrally planned model in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929. Rising nationalism in Turkish society also drew the attention of government officials. As a consequence of a law passed in 1932, which restricted some professions to Turkish nationals, foreign citizens living in Turkey were forced to give up their professions, regardless of their nationality (i.e. including Hungarians). From 1935 onwards, Hungarian experts, such as skilled workers and engineers, were only allowed to work in Turkey with the direct authorization of the government. The Hungarian legation in Turkey made every effort to protect the interests of these workers. However, their attempts exerted little influence on Turkish decision makers. To sum up, the story of Hungarian migrants in Turkey between 1924 and 1935 cannot be characterizing as long-lasting.

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APPENDIX 1

Province	Population
Adana	31
Afyonkarahisar	1
Aksaray	*
Amasya	4
Ankara	637
Antalya	7
Artvin	*
Aydın	7
Balıkesir	20
Bayazıt (Ağrı)	*
Bilecik	3
Bitlis	*
Bolu	*
Burdur	*
Bursa	14
Cebelibereket (Osmaniye)	2
Çanakkale	1
Çankırı	4
Çorum	4
Denizli	2
Diyarbekir	*
Edirne	13
Elaziz (Elazığ)	*
Erzincan	*
Erzurum	*
Eskişehir	22
Gaziantep	*
Giresun	*
Gümüşhane	*
Hakkari	*
İçel	*
Isparta	*
İstanbul	636
İzmir	129
Kars	*
Kastamonu	1
Kayseri	12
Kırklareli	34
Kırşehir	2
Kocaeli	3
Konya	43
Kütahya	38
Malatya	3
Manisa	6
Maraş	8
Mardin	*
Mersin	5
Muğla	29
Niğde	*
Ordu	4
Rize	*
Samsun	41
Siirt	*
Sinop	*
Sivas	*
Şebinkarahisar	2
Tekirdağ	12
Tokat	11
Trabzon	*
Urfa	1
Van	*
Yozgat	4
Zonguldak	34
TOTAL	1830

 

Table 4. Population of Hungarian Citizens in accordance to the 1927 census: Distribution per provinces111

 

Croatian Political Refugees Living in Emigration in the Interwar Period: The Case of the Croatian Political Refugees in Hungary

Petra Hamerli

PhD student, University of Pécs – “Sapienza” University of Rome

After the disintegraton of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the successor states also had to face the old problem of the “nationality question”. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (which in 1929 became the first incarnation of Yugoslavia) was the most multi-ethnic or multinational state in the region, and this led to conflicts, in particular between Serbs and Croats. When Alexander I introduced the dictatorship (January 6, 1929), many Croats decided to leave Yugoslavia. Most of them emigrated to Latin America, but Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, as neighboring states, were also popular directions.

Many of the refugees left Yugoslavia for political reasons. Most of them emigrated to states that were interested in or actively sought the disintegration or at least weakening of Yugoslavia, such as Hungary and Italy, but many of them chose Austria, Belgium, and Germany.

In this essay I focus primarily on the Croatian political refugees living in Hungary. The most important sources on these refugees are found in the Sate Archives of Italy (Archivio Centrale di Stato di Roma, ACS) in the material entitled “Carte Conti,” which includes the list of Croats for whom warrants had been issued and who were followed continuously by the Zagreb police and the Yugoslav authorities for political reasons. I also use primary sources to assess the role that the Croatian camp Jankapuszta, and the house in Nagykanizsa bought by the Ustaše leader Gustav Perčec played in the lives of migrants and in diplomatic calamities. In addition to the sources in the Sate Archives, I also draw on the documents of the Archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, ASMAE) and the National Archives of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára, MNL OL).

Keywords: Croatian refugees in Hungary, Jankapuszta, Ustaše

Although migration is often considered a problem more prominent in recent times, it has been existing for many centuries. In the late 1800s, political migration became more and more frequent, and this trend continued after World War I, as certain political parties were prohibited in their homeland and members of certain minority groups tried to organize themselves in abroad.

In this essay, I present an example of this special type of migration, sketching the activity of the Croatian separatists who emigrated in the interwar period. After presenting briefly the main characteristics of Croatian separatism and the main directions of migration among Croats in the period, I focus on the Croatian political refugees living in Hungary, both in the refugee camp Jankapuszta and in the house bought in Nagykanizsa, which was maintained thanks to Hungarian–Italian collaboration in support of the Ustaše Movement.

The Organization of Croatian Separatism – Aims and Principles

After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed and the successor states were born. One of them was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was founded to unify the South-Slavic population of Europe. The new kingdom counted more than a dozen different nations among its inhabitants, and tensions between them emerged from the beginning, as these nations considered themselves different not simply because of their ethnicities, but also their confessions, cultures, and histories. Since the dominant Serbian nation formed only 40 percent of the total population and Croats comprised 24 percent, the conflicts between the Serbian and Croatian national agendas were by far the most prominent and the most influential in political life.1

The tensions became graver after the parliamentary session of 20 June 1928, when a member of the Serbian People’s Radical Party, Puniša Račić, shot at deputies of the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska Republikanska Seljačka Stranka). Some Croatian politicians were killed immediately, while the leader, Stjepan Radić, was mortally wounded (he died on 8 August in Zagreb).2

The Croatian separatists searched for support abroad, and they found it in Hungary, Italy, Germany, Austria, and South America. Hungary and Italy collaborated in providing support for Croatian aspirations, as both sought the disintegration of the Yugoslav state.3 In the late 1920s, the two states campaigned for an independent Croatia in the press in an effort to win sympathy for the Croatian cause in global public opinion.4

Why Hungary and Italy? In order to understand this, one must know a little bit about Hungarian and Italian foreign policy aspirations concerning Yugoslavia in the interwar period.5 Italy had two reasons to be anxious about Yugoslavia’s existence. On the one hand, Italy was persuaded to enter the First World War as an Entente ally because of the territorial promises made in the secret Treaty of London, which was signed on April 26, 1915. After the war, however, these promises could not be kept. The territories promised to Italy in the treaty included the middle part of Dalmatia and the Eastern part of Istria, and this, in particular, led to conflicts between Italy and Yugoslavia,6 since these territories were given to the South-Slavic kingdom. On the other hand, Italy wanted to get more influence in the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin, and it aimed to establish hegemony in the Adriatic as well. Yugoslavia was an obstacle to this merely because of its geographical position,7 so Italy aimed to encircle and ultimately dissolve Yugoslavia by intensifying its inner ethnic and national conflicts. The Italian plan, which took the name of General Pietro Badoglio, depended on the assistance of Hungary, and also Albania, Bulgaria and Romania,8 because these states also had territorial conflicts with Yugoslavia.

The Hungarian aims were less complicated than the Italian ones: after World War I, Hungary lost two thirds of its territory in accordance with the terms of the Peace Treaty of Trianon, which was signed on June 4, 1920. These territorial losses meant the loss of important economic, industrial and cultural centers, and one-third of the population of pre-war Hungary found itself living outside the new frontiers. Yugoslavia was given the region of Vojvodina from Hungary, which meant the loss of the most significant agricultural territory of the country. It is hardly a surprise that treaty revision became Hungary’s main political aim.9 As treaty revision was blocked primarily by the Little Entente, formed in 1920/21 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia with the goal of maintaining the status quo established after the war, Hungary wanted to weaken the stability of this organization. Thus, Hungary constituted an excellent partner for Italy in its efforts to support Croatian separatism: Hungarian politicians thought that the collapse or breakup of one of the Little Entente states could weaken the alliance against Hungarian revisionism.10

These common political interests led to the signing of the Italian–Hungarian Treaty of Friendship on April 5, 1927, in a secret clause of which the signatories agreed that they would give political and diplomatic support to each other to further the solution of the questions in which they were interested.11 In other words, Italy would provide support for Hungarian treaty revision and Hungary would make efforts to weaken Yugoslavia.

The Hungarian–Italian support of Croatian Separatism became significant after the introduction of the dictatorship in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 6 January 1929. When King Alexander I made this decision to resolve the inner ethnic conflicts which had plagued the state, in October 1929 the name of the state was changed to Yugoslavia in order to express the unity of its nations.12 As a response, Ante Pavelić emigrated to Italy, where he founded the Ustaše movement (Ustaša Hrvatska Revolucionarna Organizacija, Ustaše Revolutionary Movement of Croatia), which aimed to create an independent Croatia at whatever cost, including armed conflict.13 On June 1, 1933, Pavelić summarized the Ustaše principles in 17 points, according to which the Croatian nation looked back on 1400 years of history, which was why it could not be a second factor in a foreign state. According to the document, the Independent State of Croatia would unify all of the territories inhabited by Croats. To be a good Croat, citizens of the independent Croatia imagined by Pavelić had to follow some principles in their everyday life, such as having a balanced family life, following the Catholic religion, having military virtues, and paying attention to the cultural development of the Croatian nation. Pavelić thought that Croats with these qualities could establish an independent state, and he thought the peasantry would be able to maintain control of this territory by working on it. This according to his vision, the lands (along with other elements of the material and cultural heritage of the country) were the property of the state, and the Croats, whose individual will was ideally subordinated to national interests, could only use them for the benefit of the Independent Croatian State.14

These ideas were welcomed warmly both by Hungary and Italy, since they were an expression of the aspiration for the secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia and, thus, the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini not only welcomed warmly the Croatian politicians who had emigrated to Italy and the foundation of their movement, but also promised war materials to support its development.15 After the Ustaše was founded in 1929, or, according to some sources, in 1931, it carried out approximately one hundred assassinations and bombings until its most famous act, the regicide in Marseille (October 9, 1934). Nearly the half of these attacks were launched from Italy, Hungary, or Austria.16

On April 20, 1929, Pavelić and Gustav Perčec, one of his most faithful peers, traveled to Sofia, where they met the leader of the radical wing of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO, Vatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija – VMRO), Ivan Mihailov. The three politicians agreed on the collaboration of Croatian and Macedonian separatists to gain their independence.17 That summer, Pavelić met with the Hungarian diplomat Gábor Apor in Vienna, who also promised moral and financial support for the Ustaše.18

On September 19, 1932, the Ustaše attempted to organize an uprising, which failed. That autumn, Mussolini and Gyula Gömbös, who became Prime Minister of Hungary in October 1932, met in Rome and decided to devote more attention to and provide more support for the movement to increase the chances Yugoslavia disintegrating. The two prime ministers agreed to create Croatian refugee camps for political refugees in the territory of their states. In Italy, these camps were coordinated by the inspector of Pisa, Ercole Conti,19 and the most important ones were in Lipari, Bovigno, and Brescia.20 In Hungary, there was only one Croatian camp, near the Hungarian–Croatian frontier, in Somogy County. The land where the camp was located was called Jankapuszta, and it was bought in 1931 by Perčec, who lived in Hungary under the name Emil Horvát. Perčec also bought a house in Nagykanizsa, a nearby city, for the Ustaše functionaries. As Perčec succeeded in establishing good relations with some of the authorities in Nagykanizsa, he was able to buy other possessions for the Croatian separatists, too.21

Henceforward, I will focus on the Croatian (Ustaše) migrants living in Hungary in the interwar period. I will give an overview of the circumstances they had to face. First, I offer a brief analysis of the social situation of the Croatian political refugees, based on the catalogue in the National Archives of Italy on Croats for whom warrants had been issued for political reasons by the Yugoslav authorities. I also attempt to reconstruct what really happened in Jankapuszta, where the only Hungarian-based Ustaše camp was found.

Croatian Political Refugees Living in Hungary

After King Alexander I introduced a dictatorship in his empire, many Croatian citizens decided to emigrate. A list of migrants in the National Archives of Zagreb includes the names of all of the Croats who chose the emigration after the dictatorship in 1929. According to this list, the favored destinations were South America (especially Argentina and Uruguay) and, within Europe, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Italy.22 The migrants had a diverse array of social backgrounds; students, intellectuals, land owners, ex-soldiers, and workers decided in equally significant proportions to leave the new proclaimed kingdom of Yugoslavia. Generally, whole families emigrated together, so along with the men who left, women and children also began new lives in another country.23 This list shows a general picture of the prevailing pattern of migration, which can be considered a typical case of people leaving their homeland primarily in the hopes of finding better living conditions.

The Statistic Yearbook of Yugoslavia shows the exact number of people who emigrated from the country. I examined the period between 1927 and 1934, when Hungarian (and the Italian) collaboration with the Croatian separatists was the most intense. These data show a large number of emigrants (187,550 people), who chose European and non-European countries in roughly the same proportions (European: 53.13 percent; non-European: 46.87 percent). The most popular European destination was France, where 18.89 percent of the total number of emigrants decided to live. Turkey was in second place. Regarding the non-European countries, most of the emigrants departed for Argentina (14.88 percent), 13.2 percent went to the USA, and 10.41 percent to Canada. The data suggest that these destinations were popular because of economic reasons, as most of the emigrants who arrived in these countries settled down in 1929/30, just as the Great Depression was beginning (Table 1). Unfortunately, the Statistical Yearbook does not provide exact data on how many of the emigrants were Croats, but it has data from the ten provinces (banovina) created by Alexander I in 1929. The Croats constituted a majority in Banovina Dravska, Moravska and Savska, and, according to the statistics, most of the emigrants came from these regions and from Banovina Vardarska, where Macedonians formed a majority.24

 

Country	1927	1928	1929	1930	1931	1932	1933	1934	Altogether	percent	Political emigrants from total	percent
Albania	0	0	0	594	210	289	880	653	2626	1.40	11	0.42
Austria	695	980	1309	739	606	360	104	418	5211	2.78	39	0.75
Belgium	255	1380	4349	1660	49	31	52	34	7810	4.16	28	0.36
Bulgaria	698	366	41	74	125	179	560	463	2506	13.36	3	0.12
Czecho­slovakia	588	731	524	724	499	498	416	1103	5083	2.71	7	0.14
France	437	1728	8064	13593	4722	1947	2305	2629	35425	18.89	9	0.025
Germany	184	811	1198	2614	1482	507	6	448	7250	3.87	5	0.07
Greece	1085	1470	255	922	604	320	313	285	5254	2.80	0	-
Hungary	155	353	102	398	178	114	49	54	1403	0.75	367 (or more than half of the political emigrants)	26.16
Italy	190	219	302	140	97	37	33	37	1055	0.56	92	8.72
Luxembourg	358	467	948	62	10	6	0	0	1851	0.98	0	-
Netherland	267	534	546	400	51	40	153	8	1999	1.07	0	-
Romania	226	1383	938	1312	991	795	662	524	6831	3.64	0	-
Switzerland	0	30	38	235	24	15	3	10	355	0.19	1	0.28
Turkey	1024	1369	618	1911	877	1433	1931	4123	13286	7.08	1	0.008
Other European Countries	398	717	193	31	35	71	41	215	1701	0.90	5	0.29
Argentina	7127	7484	6688	4759	883	249	281	442	27913	14.88	12	0.04
Australia	1138	436	205	193	87	83	144	152	2438	1.29	0	-
Bolivia	7	76	20	12	7	18	10	13	163	0.09	0	-
Brasile	2527	499	636	294	39	10	38	59	4102	2.18	2	0.05
Canada	4656	5921	4030	2745	604	491	537	543	19527	10.41	1	0.005
Chile	425	375	279	184	99	97	37	48	1544	0,82	0	-
Latin America	56	75	72	40	15	11	2	14	285	0,15	0	-
New Zealand	130	88	78	89	49	38	16	40	528	0,28	0	-
Peru	184	36	154	37	5	3	2	6	427	0,23	0	-
South Africa	62	93	57	51	26	7	21	44	361	0.19	0	-
Uruguay	905	1892	1168	934	495	44	27	57	5522	2.94	2	0.04
USA	4759	4796	4792	4215	2499	1403	1106	1328	24898	13.28	8	0.03
Other Non-European Countries	0	18	10	7	0	0	0	161	196	0.10	0	-
Europe altogether	6560	12538	19425	25409	10560	6642	7508	11004	99646	53.13	568	0.57
Other continents altogether	21976	21789	18189	13560	4808	2454	2221	2907	87904	46.87	0	-
No data	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	113	-
Altogether	28536	34327	37614	38969	15368	9096	9729	13911	187550	100	706	0.38

Table 1. Croatian Emigration between 1927 and 1934

 

The number of political refugees can be reconstructed according to another catalogue found in the National Archives of Rome. On April 14, 1934, Inspector Ercole Conti got a long list from the police of Zagreb. It contained information concerning people for whom warrants had been issued by the Yugoslav authorities for political reasons.25 According to this catalogue, of the 706 people on whom warrants had been issued for political reasons, 367 were living in Hungary by then, and 60 of them had collaborated with Gustav Perčec in Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, or Zákány.26 This catalogue contains very interesting information on the Croatian political refugees in Hungary.

Comparing the data in the Statistic Yearbook and the catalogue, the number of the political refugees was insignificant as a proportion of the total number of emigrants. They constituted only 0.38 percent of the emigrants. It is surprising and significant, however, that more than a half of them chose Hungary as their destination (367 of 706), while Italy came in second place with 92 people (Table 1).

The Main Characteristics of the Activity of Croatian Political Refugees Living in Hungary

The catalogue sent by the Yugoslav authorities to Ercole Conti contains information concerning 706 people altogether on whom warrants had been issued. It contained all of the information that was known about them.27 The information in the catalogue includes:

Name

Father’s and Mother’s Names

Place of Birth

Date of Birth

Date of Issue of the Arrest Warrant

In Case of ex-Soldiers: Function in the Austro-Hungarian Army

Occupation

Direction of Emigration

Membership in Separatist Organizations

Reason for Issue of Arrest Warrant

Function in the Foreign State

Naturally, not all of this information was known for every person. Unfortunately, as the place and date of birth was not known in the majority of cases, one cannot venture generalizations concerning the average age of the refugees, but the date of the issue of the arrest warrant is a valuable piece of information. Fortunately, the destinations that were chosen by the emigrants can be identified, as can the reasons for which the arrest warrants were issued, and there is also information concerning the causal membership of the emigrants in separatist organizations. The catalogue also reveals whether or not the people mentioned were ex-soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Army. As arrest warrants were issued against many of the registered people simply because they were considered members of the Ustaše or deserters, very little information is available concerning their social backgrounds, analysis nonetheless reveals interesting interconnections.

In order to arrive at a better understanding for the nature of Croatian emigration to Hungary, it is useful to compare the data on the political refugees living in Hungary with the data concerning the other people registered on the list.

Regarding destination (Table 2), more than half (51.98 percent) of the political refugees chose Hungary, while Italy was in second place (1303 percent). These choices were influenced probably not simply by the fact that Italy and Hungary were neighboring states, but also by the fact that they welcomed Croatian political refugees warmly. Furthermore, Hungary and Italy supported the Ustaše Movement, and, although the living place of the Ustaše members in 1934 was unknown, the statistics based on the catalogue clearly show that members of this organization often emigrated for Italy and Hungary. Political refugees from Yugoslavia moved to Austria and Belgium as well. While Austria was, together with Hungary and Italy, a popular destination for Ustaše members, Belgium was chosen by people who wanted to establish an independent Croatia with a campaign in the press. Some of the emigrants, such as Svetozar Pribičević, decided to emigrate to France, and some Croats moved to Albania, Argentina, and Czechoslovakia. An insignificant number of emigrants chose Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Turkey, or Uruguay as their destinations.28

With regards to the 367 Croatian political refugees living in Hungary, they were dispersed in the country. They lived in Budapest, Hódmezővásárhely, Szeged, Gyékényes, Kaposvár, Pécs, and Zalaegerszeg, i.e. in cities not far from the Yugoslav–Hungarian frontier, and, of course, in the three aforementioned places where Gustav Perčec resided: Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, and Zákány. In these three latter settlements, records indicate that there were altogether 60 people29 who organized the political activity of the Ustaše Movement and its members with the intention of fostering separatism. As the catalogue says, they did not remain continuously at the same place, as the political activity necessitated a lot of traveling. For this reason, there were no more than 50 political refugees in the Jankapuszta refugee camp at the same time.30

 

Reason for the Issue of an Arrest Warrant	Altogether (number)	Hungary (number)	Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, Zákány (number)	Altogether (percent)	Hungary (percent)	Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, Zákány (percent)
Deserter	110	102	-	15.58	14.44	-
Dissident	78	39	2	11.04	5.52	0.26
Collaboration with radical separatists	36	24	18	5.09	3.39	2.54
Member of Ustaše Movement	119	9	8	16.85	1.27	1.13
Organizing assassinations	31	16	8	4.39	2.26	1.13
Political activity	125	47	10	17.70	6.65	1.41
Propaganda	35	6	1	4.95	0.84	0.14
Spying	116	102	4	16.43	14.44	5.26
Terrorism	28	9	7	3.96	1.27	0.99
Trafficking weapons	6	4	-	0.84	0.56	-
Other	14	5	-	1.98	0.71	-
No data	8	4	2	1.13	0.56	0.26
Altogether	706	367	60	100	51.98	8.5

Table 3. Reason for the Issue of Arrest Warrant

 

Separatist Organizations	Altogether (number)	Hungary (number)	Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, Zákány (number)	Altogether (percent)	Hungary (percent)	Jankapuszta, Nagykanizsa, Zákány (percent)
Croatian Legion	84	84	1	11.89	100	0.14
ÉME	3	3	-	0.42	100	-
Honvédség	15	15	-	2.12	100	-
Hrvatski Domobran/Obrana	31	16	1	4.39	2.26	0.14
Milizia Croata	8	-	-	1.13	-	-
Ustaše	169	26	21	23.94	3.68	2.97
Other	8	-	-	4.39	-	-
No data	396	223	37	56.09	31.58	5.24
Altogether	706	367	60	100	51.98	8.5

Table 4. Members of Separatist Organizations

The catalogue clearly indicates why the individual arrest warrants were issued by the Yugoslav authorities (Tables 3 and 4).

As Table 3 shows, most of the people who were followed by the Yugoslav authorities because of political reasons were deserters,31 members of the Ustaše, suspected of being spies, or suspected of engaging in continued political activity. Some people were followed by the Yugoslav police simply because they were dissidents and the Yugoslav state had little knowledge of their activity in emigration. Naturally, there were refugees who were not members of any of the separatist organizations, but who collaborated with them. Some of the political refugees spread propaganda in support of Croatian independence in the press. They usually lived in a country in South America or in Belgium. 4-5 percent of the politically suspicious people registered in the catalogue were followed by the Yugoslav authorities because they were suspected of having been complicit in the organization of assassinations or terror acts, and an insignificant number of them attempted to traffic weapons or were followed because they had committed other serious acts, such as murder or an attempt to escape from prison.32

In many of the cases, being a member of the Ustaše Movement was considered a crime. Naturally, there were Ustaše members who had committee other crimes, in addition to this, such as spying, engaging in political activity, organizing assassinations, organizing or committing acts of terrorism, or being deserters. In this case, the catalogue identifies the second crime as the reason for the issue of the arrest warrant. As a consequence, there were more Ustaše members (169) according to the number indicating membership in a separatist organization than based on the reason for the issue of an arrest warrant (119).

Other Croatian separatist organizations were founded, in addition to the Ustaše. About 44 percent (310 persons) of the registered refugees belonged to one of them. The majority of these 310 refugees (169) belonged to the Ustaše, and the Croatian Legion, which, according to the catalogue given to Ercole Conti, was formed in Zalaegerszeg after World War I, counted 84 members. The people who were pursued by the Yugoslav police for being members of the Croatian Legion were usually considered deserters, as 29 of them had been soldiers (28 of them had been officers) in the Austro-Hungarian Army before. The Hrvatski Domobran (sometimes written Obrana), which literally means Croatian Defense Force, was not a military corps, but a political organization that was originally formed in 1928 by the Croats within Yugoslavia and later had strong connections with the Ustaše. According to the catalogue, this organization counted 31 members. In addition to these larger organizations, other Croatian groups were founded in the countries of South America. Some of the Croatian political refugees were registered by the Yugoslav police because they joined the armies of other states (Hungary, Italy).

Based on the catalogue, the deserters and the spies were over-represented in Hungary. Of the 110 deserters, 102 emigrated to Hungary, and most of them (84) joined the Croatian Legion, which was a Croatian organization found only in Hungary. Some Croats decided to enter Ébredő Magyarok Egyesülete (ÉME, Association of Awaking Hungarians), which was an extreme right-wing paramilitarily corps which, though it was prohibited in 1922, remained an influential movement in Hungary in the 1920s. Some of the Croatian émigrés joined the Hungarian army.33 The data show that the majority of the Croatian political refugees living in Hungary emigrated earlier than 1929, probably after the creation of Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

There were also some Croatian intellectuals who emigrated to Hungary because of their political activity, such as Ivo Frank, the ex-deputy of the Croatian Party of Rights. He was living in Budapest as of 1918, where he began a campaign for Croatian independence with the approval of the Hungarian Government.34 Frank, who wanted to attract the attention of the world to the efforts to find supporters for Croatian independence,35 wrote a memorandum with Pavelić in which they summarized the claims of Croats and promised Hungary and Italy particularly good relations and made offers to collaborate.36 They promised that an independent Croatia will respect Italy’s priority in the Adriatic.37 The individuals who are noted in the catalogue as members of the Hrvatski Domobran/Obrana usually had connections with Ivo Frank.38 This probably verifies that the Hungarian office of this separatist organization was led by Frank.

The other Croatian emigrants, who had no ties to (para)military organizations, often worked for Hungary as spies, secret agents, or interpreters. Spies were also over-represented among the refugees in Hungary, as 102 of 116 registered spies registered worked for the Hungarian intelligence service. Probably, the most prominent among them was Josip Metzger, who emigrated to Budapest in 1919, where he got in touch with Ivo Frank. Metzger served in the intelligence section of the Hungarian Defense Ministry, and, according to the catalogue, he spied in the service of Hungary.39 Later, he moved to Jankapuszta and took part in the political activity organized in the camp.40

Regarding the 169 registered Ustaše members, in most cases their destinations remained unknown. Those whose place of residency was identified by the Yugoslav authorities lived in Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Belgium (though only in smaller numbers in the case of the last two). According to the catalogue, 26 Ustaše members were active in Hungary, and 21 of them lived in Jankapuszta/Nagykanizsa/Zákány, where about 60 Croatian émigrés were active at some point between 1932 and 1934.

Jankapuszta

In 1932, when Mussolini and Gömbös agreed to establish camps for Croatian migrants in their countries, Gustav Perčec, who earlier had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army as a military officer and had connections with some Hungarians, thought that land near to the Yugoslav–Hungarian frontier would be optimal for organizing acts of terrorism against Yugoslavia.41 Originally, he searched for property near Sopron, but in the end he found farmland that was inconspicuous enough to hide the Ustaše members and their associates in the neighborhood of Nagykanizsa. The farmland was the property of Gyula Szájbély, and Perčec rented it under the name Emil Horváth.42 As the first refugees arrived in 1931, from that moment the Hungarian inhabitants near the land were prohibited from trespassing on it,43 which suggests that the refugees did not come into contact with the “simple” Hungarian people. Rather, they only had connections with certain Hungarian individuals, who had the approval of the government.

According to the catalogue of the Yugoslav authorities on the Croatian political refugees, 60 people were active at some point in Jankapuszta or on the other pieces of real estate purchased by Perčec,44 and the largest number of people living in Jankapuszta at the same time was approximately 50.45 When the decision was made on April 26, 1934 to liquidate the camp, there were roughly 30 people living in it.46

Following Perčec’s orders, the members of the group living in Jankapuszta carried out several bombing attacks using arms hidden on the trains that departed from Hungary for Yugoslavia. The Hungarian authorities found this activity very embarrassing, since they had allowed for the creation of a refugee-camp, but not a terrorist training ground, and the situation became more awkward in November 1933, when Jelka Pogorelec, Perčec’s former lover, confessed to the existence of the camp.47 The inspector of the Secret police of Yugoslavia, Vladeta Miličević, helped Pogorelec publish her booklet in a Yugoslav daily paper entitled Novosti.48

After it was published in Novosti, the booklet, entitled Tanje emigrantskih zločinaca [“The Secret of the Wicked Emigrés”], was translated into many languages.49 Pogorelec’s aim, as she herself wrote, was to make the activity of the Ustaše evident to the public, as she found herself unable simply to watch in silence the cruelty and the terror that she had to experience when she had been in relationship with Perčec.50

According to Pogorelec, life in Jankapuszta was very hard for the refugees living there. Perčec ordered them to maintain the camp and take responsibility for its operations, and migrants were collected to work on it. Those who would have preferred to choose their family instead of the fight for an independent Croatia were terrorized by the commanders. According to the booklet, these people had to live under continuous threat, and they were forced to do hard agricultural work in the morning, while in the afternoon they were taught how to use the weapons sent from Italy. Pogorelec was desperate not only because of the terror to which she bore witness, but also because of the attempts made by some of the emigrants to escape and the suicides which, according to her, were not infrequent.51

Colonel Tattay, one of the soldiers who was in contact with the Croats in Jankapuszta, submitted a report to the Hungarian Government on his impressions of Pogorelec’s confession.52 According to his account, it was true that she had been Perčec’s lover, but she had not lived in Jankapuszta, but in Budapest. Sometimes Perčec had taken her with him to the camp, but she had never handled his correspondence. According to Tattay, the woman had visited the camp simply as Perčec’s lover, but this had been little more than a mistake on Perčec’s part, as it had given her a chance to gather information about the camp,53 which functioned in secret.

Perčec, however, was not the only person who made a serious mistake. While trying to give an explanation that contradicted important parts of Pogorelec’s account, Tattay actually revealed the truth about Jankapuszta. He explained that guns were not manufactured in the camp, but it was true that the refugees living there were taught how to use pistols, and they were obliged to take part in military exercises in addition to doing their daily work in the field.54 Tattay’s report confirms that there was a military training camp in Jankapuszta. This is confirmed by the catalogue, as well, since according to the data it contains, 21 of the 60 people living on Perčec’s real estate possessions were members of the Ustaše. Regarding the reasons for the issue of arrest warrants, 18 people were pursued simply because of this fact (i.e. that they were members of the Ustaše), and at least 8 other people collaborated with them. 7 of the 60 people were considered terrorists, and according to the catalogue, 8 had organized assassination attempts. 10 of the 60 people were wanted because of their political activity, and 4 of them were pursued by the Yugoslav authorities because they were accused of spying. Two ex-military officers also lived at Jankapuszta: Gustav Perčec and Vjekoslav Servatzy.55

Naturally, after Pogorelec’s booklet was published, the Yugoslav Government expressed its disapproval of the existence of Jankapuszta, and the Hungarian Government, which originally supposed that a refugee camp had been established, ordered its liquidation on April 26, 1934, i.e. before the assassination of King Alexander I in Marseille on October 9, 1934. The Hungarian government also promised Belgrade that Hungary would expel Croatian emigrants who had done anything which, according to Hungarian penal law, could be considered a crime.56 After these events, Pavelić immediately ordered Perčec to leave Hungary, and he sent Vjekoslav Servatzy to replace him. Servatzy was put in charge of the Croats who could remain in Hungary as real refugees.57

The Most Significant People at Jankapuszta

In 1931, when the Ustaše got the approval of the Hungarian Government to establish a refugee camp in Hungary, Pavelić appointed Gustav Perčec to be its leader. Perčec was born in Valpovo, and he had a residence in Zagreb. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army, and he had several false names (Emil Horvát, Lajos Horvát, etc.), which suggests that he was in the intelligence service as well. The Yugoslav authorities (the Zagreb Police Directorate) began paying attention to him in 1921, as he was suspected of having connections to the Croatian migrants who had been exiled for political reasons and were living in Hungary. He got in touch with Pavelić in 1928, and one year later he traveled to Sofia as a member of the Croatian committee to negotiate with the representatives of IMRO. Because of his participation in the organization of terrorist acts, he was sentenced to death by the Belgrade court in 1929, so he fled to Vienna, where he lived for several years until he moved to Jankapuszta. There, he held military training exercises for other Croatian refugees with the help of some Hungarian military officers.58 After the existence of Jankapuszta was revealed, Pavelić ordered Perčec to leave Hungary, and later (probably in 1935), Pavelić ordered his execution.59

Among the people who were later implicated in the assassination of Marseille, Mijo Bžik, Mijo Kralj, Ivan Rajić, and Zvonimir Pospišil all had lived in Jankapuszta at some time.60 Mijo Bžik was born in 1907 in Koprivnica. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for having taken part in the commission of terrorist acts, so he fled to Hungary. He arrived in Jankapuszta in February 1933, together with Mijo Kralj.61 Pospišil escaped to Hungary in 1929, having been sentenced to death by the tribunal of Belgrade, as he was implicated in attempts to commit political assassinations. In April 1934, he lived in Budapest, and he had good relations both with the Ustaše group of Perčec and with some Hungarian authorities who were involved in the existence of Jankapuszta.62 No information is available on Ivan Rajić, who was supposed to be the fourth person among the participants in the Marseille assassination who had lived in Hungary for a while.

As of 1929, a well-known Ustaše member, Mijo Babić, was also living in Hungary. When the camp in Jankapuszta was opened, he moved there, and he had close connections with Pošpisil and Perčec. Babić had to flee to Hungary because he had been sentenced to death by the tribunal of Belgrade for having organized terrorist acts and assassination attempt. Originally, he had been a chauffeur.63 As he managed to escape in 1941, after the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, he became an officer in Pavelić’s army.

According to the Croatian secondary literature, for a brief period, Dr. Mile Budak also visited the camp.64 If this was the case, than his visit must have been before 1933, as according to the police catalogue in 1933 he traveled to Czechoslovakia and became an active member of the Croatian émigré community there.65

Emil Lahovsky was another significant person among the Croats living in Hungary. He was pursued by the Yugoslav authorities for spying. He also worked for the Ministry of Agriculture in Hungary. After the liquidation of Jankapuszta, he was invited to Italy to be one of the leaders of the Ustaše’s military corps.66 He was born in 1896 in Donji Miholjac (which at the time had been in Hungary; its name in Hungarian is Alsómiholjác). He came to Hungary in 1921. In April 1934, according to the catalogue in the National Archives of Italy, he lived in Budapest, but he often traveled to different destinations, and he worked for the intelligence service.67

The Consequences

The existence of Jankapuszta became very awkward for Hungary not while the camp was actually in operation, but after its liquidation, as it became the foundation for accusations against Hungary for having participated in the organization of the assassination in Marseille, in which King Alexander I was assassinated and Louis Barthou, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, was killed, along with their chauffeur and two bystanders. The regicide was executed by a terrorist group consisting of seven people.68 The supposed murderer of the king was Vlado Černozemski, born Velichko Dimitrov Kerin, named also Kelemen. He was an expert assassin, but there is no information concerning him after 1932, so in the Hungarian historical writing it is supposed that he was already dead by 1934 so he may could not have been the murderer.69

The assassination was not unexpected, since in December 1933 there had already been an attempt to murder the king during his visit to Zagreb. The would-be assassin was a young man named Petar Oreb who lived in Italy but held a Hungarian passport.70 Oreb and his two accomplices confessed that they had started training in an Italian Ustaše camp where the Croatian inhabitants had been given arms to start revolutions and assassinate prominent figures in Yugoslavia.71 Bogoljub Jevtić, the Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs, confronted Carlo Galli, the Italian ambassador in Belgrade, with these confessions, so Galli warned Mussolini that the Yugoslav political elite knew about the Italian support given to Pavelić and Perčec.72

When the assassination took place in Marseille, photography was already in widespread use, so witnesses were able to take photos of the assassin. The photos revealed that the murderer was a Bulgarian Macedonian who had lived in Jankapuszta with the Croatian refugees before the fateful events.73 The contention that King Alexander’s murderer came from Jankapuszta appeared on the day after the assassination in the French press.74 It was probably based in no small part on the confession made by Pogorelec, according to which assassinations were organized and guns were manufactured in the Jankapuszta Camp.75 The French press, which used Pogorelec’s booklet as a basis for accusations against Hungary, probably utilized this point to underpin the French theory concerning the manufacture of guns in Jankapuszta. Hungary tried to defend itself before the delegates of the Great Powers. Zoltán Baranyai, the permanent Hungarian delegate in the Council of the League of Nations, contended that the accusations against Hungary had to be treated carefully since they were being made in the French and Yugoslav press. In reality, he claimed, Hungary could only be blamed for having failed to keep a closer eye on the meetings which took place in coffee houses and articles printed in the press of the Croatian refugees. Baranyai denied that Hungarians had trained refugees living in Jankapuszta or had given them guns.76 Naturally, he was simply making the remarks that he had been ordered to make by the Hungarian Government, since the assassination of the king made the approval Hungary has early given the Ustaše to establish a camp in Hungarian territory embarrassing for Hungarian politicians.

Within a few days, Mussolini and Gömbös had had a conversation on the Marseille assassination and its consequences. Gömbös tried to argue that Hungary had only given shelter to the refugees, but had not been involved in the assassination. He contended that the support that had been provided for the refugees and the murder of the king were two completely different things which had to be treated separately.77 Kánya Kálmán, the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, also met with Mussolini to discuss the embarrassing case. Kánya informed Mussolini that Hungary and Yugoslavia had reached an agreement concerning the liquidation of the Croatian camps in Hungary’s territory a few months before the assassination, and Jankapuszta had been liquidated, though it seemed that some Croats may have remained in the country.78 As we have seen, this was true, since after April 1934 Jankapuszta closed its doors, and the Croatian emigrants who had taken part in or were organizing terrorist acts were supposed to have left Hungary, where only genuine refugees who had come to Hungary because their lives were in danger in Yugoslavia were entitled to remain.

Summary

In this essay, I have given a brief overview of the main characteristics of Croatian political refugees on whom records were kept by the Yugoslav authorities. The catalogue found in the National Archives of Italy provides information concerning the destinations chosen by the emigrants, the reasons for which arrest warrants were issued against them, and their membership in separatist organizations, thus offering an interesting picture of the Croatian political refugees living in Hungary.

60 of the 367 Croatian political refugees in Hungary lived at one of the properties owned by Gustav Perčec, the leader of the Ustaše group in Hungary. Most of these 60 refugees were members or supporters of the Ustaše, and many of them organized terrorist acts and assassinations. However, most of the Croatian political refugees living in Hungary were not terrorists or Ustaše members, but deserters or spies, who pursued a less radical form of political activity in support of Croatian independence.

Bibliography

Archival Sources

Archivio Centrale dello Stato di Roma (ACS)

Archivio Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASMAE)

Hrvatski Državni Arhiv (HDA)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MNL OL)

Document Collections

I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani. Quinta serie, Volume 3. A cura di Rodolfo Mosca. Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1953.

I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani. Settima serie, Volumi 7, 8, 14 and 16. A cura di Rodolfo Mosca. Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1953.

Statistički godišnjak Kraljovine Jugoslavije 1934–1935. Belgrade: Stamparija Radenković 1937.

 

 

 

 

 

Secondary Literature

 

Carocci, Giampiero. La politica estera dell’Italia fascista. Bari: Laterza 1969.

Gobetti, Eric. Dittatore per caso: un piccolo duce protetto dall’Italia fascista. Naples: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2001.

Hamerli, Petra. “The Hungarian-Italian Support of the Croatian Separatism between 1928 and 1934.” West Bohemian Historical Review 5, no 1 (2015): 51–70.

Hornyák, Árpád. “A kettősbirtokosság intézménye a magyar–jugoszláv határon a két világháború között” [The institution of dual ownership on the Hungarian–Yugoslav border between the two world wars]. In Találkozások-ütközések: Fejezetek a 20. századi magyar–szerb kapcsolatok történetéből [Meetings and collisions: Chapters in the history of Hungarian–Serbian relations in the twentieth century], edited by idem, 61–74. Pécs: Bocz, 2010.

Hornyák, Árpád. Magyar–jugoszláv diplomáciai kapcsolatok, 1918–1927 [Hungarian–Yugoslav diplomatic Relations, 1918–1927]. Novi Sad: Forum, 2004.

Iuso, Pasquale. Il fascismo e gli ustascia, 1929–1941: il separatismo croato in Italia. Rome: Gangemi, 1998.

Jelić-Butić, Fikreta. Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945. Zagreb: Sveučilišna Naklada Liber/Školska Knjiga, 1977.

Krizman, Bogdan. Pavelić i ustaše. Zagreb: Globus, 1978.

L. Nagy, Zsuzsa. “Itália és Magyarország a párizsi békekonferencia idején, 1919” [Italy and Hungary at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919]. In: Magyarország és a nagyhatalmak a 20. században [Hungary and the Great Powers in the twentieth century], edited by Ignác Romsics, n.p. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1995.

Ormos, Mária. “Bethlen koncepciója az olasz–magyar szövetségről (1927–1931)” [Bethlen’s concept of an Italian–Hungarian Alliance (1927–1931)]. Történelmi Szemle 14, no.1–2 (1971): 133–56.

Ormos, Mária. Merénylet Marseille-ben [Assassination in Marseille]. Budapest: Kossuth, 1984.

Pino, Adriano and Giorgio Cingolani. La via dei conventi. Ante Pavelić e il terrorismo ustascia dal Fascismo alla Guerra Fredda. Milan: Mursia, 2011.

Šadek, Vladimir. Ustaše i Janka-puszta. Prilozi o djelovanju logora Janka-puszta i razvoju ustaško-domobarnskog pokreta u Podravini za vrijeme monarhističke Jugoslavije. Molve: Društvo za Povijest i Starine–Molve, 2012.

Sokcsevits, Dénes. Horvátország a 7. századtól napjainkig [Croatia from the seventh century to the present day]. Budapest: Mundus Novus, 2011.

 

Country	Number of emigrants for whom arrest warrants had been issued for political reasons	Percent of the total number of emigrants for whom arrest warrants had been issued for political reasons
Albania	11	1.56
Argentina	12	1.70
Austria	39	5.52
Belgium	28	3.97
Brazil	2	0.28
Bulgaria	3	0.42
Canada	1	0.14
Czechoslovakia	7	0.99
France	9	1.27
Germany	5	0.71
Hungary	367	51.98
Italy	92	13.03
Poland	1	0.14
Switzerland	1	0.14
Turkey	1	0.14
Uruguay	2	0.28
United States of America	8	1.13
Yugoslavia (stayed at home)	4	0.57
No data	113	16.01
Altogether	706	100 .00

Table 2. Direction of Political Emigration

 

Return Migration to Austria-Hungary from the United States in Homeland Economic and Ethnic Politics and International Diplomacy

Kristina E. Poznan

College of William & Mary in Virginia

While Austro-Hungarian officials initially opposed emigration and considered it disloyal to leave the homeland, the massive growth of transatlantic labor migration, its economic benefits, and its potentially temporary duration prompted a change in governmental attitudes and policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Even as it continued to discourage and police the exit of emigrants, the Hungarian government, in particular, also became an active promoter of return migration. Using files from the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office, the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture, and the joint Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry, this article examines the Hungarian government’s attempts to encourage return migration to further its economic and nationalist goals. These initiatives emphasized the homecoming of desirable “patriotic” subjects, of Hungarian-speakers, and of farmers and skilled industrial workers to address the state’s perceived labor needs. Officials debated the risks of welcoming back migrants with undesirable social and political orientations and speakers of minority languages, as well as the risks of potential conflicts with the United States government.

Keywords: Austria-Hungary, emigration, loyalty, nationalism, pan-Slavism, return migration

Austria-Hungary, a continental European empire, was a state functioning in increasingly transatlantic networks by the turn of the twentieth century. Migration to the United States, the most common destination for imperial subjects, was often a temporary affair for many Central and Eastern European migrants.1 Austro-Hungarian officials scrambled to determine what mass migration meant for the stability and security of their empire and how to manage the millions of individuals crossing the Atlantic Ocean in both directions. Estimates suggest that in the early decades of mass transatlantic migration, before 1909, 17 to 27 percent of the Monarchy’s migrants returned to the Monarchy.2 U.S. Labor Department counts of migrants who returned between 1908 and 1923, broken down by “race or nationality,” recorded that 66 percent of Hungarian migrants, 57 percent of Slovak, 19 percent of Czech, and 17 percent of Rusin returned,3 putting the most recent scholarly estimate at 40 percent return migration.4 While Austro-Hungarian officials initially opposed emigration and considered it disloyal to leave the homeland, their attitudes changed in the late 1890s and the 1900s.5 The 3.7 million recorded instances of migration from Austria-Hungary to the United States between 1861 and 19136 caused tremendous domestic challenges, but the economic benefits of emigration for the sending country, officials’ inability to stop emigration, and its potentially temporary duration brought about this change. Governmental concern about emigration was widespread at the state and local levels in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office and Hungarian Ministry of Agricultural warrant particular examination as the most active agents in attempts to draw migrants home. Even as Hungarian governmental officials continued to discourage and police the exit of emigrants, they began actively to promote return migration, particularly, I argue, of desirable “patriotic” subjects. This essay will examine the Hungarian government’s efforts to promote return migration through governmental programs in the decade and a half before World War I and analyze how return migration initiatives intersected with broader governmental concerns about Hungary’s property distribution and economic development, homeland nationality politics, and diplomatic relations with the United States.

As Hungarian officials reconciled themselves to the thought of emigrants who might return, they began to try to mitigate emigration’s economic consequences and influence nationality politics by encouraging particular categories of migrants to return. The rationale behind the Prime Minister’s Office’s “American Action” initiative to maintain loyalty among migrants to the U.S. was “to keep alive among emigrants national feeling and, on that path, the intention to return.”7 Furthermore, Hungarian governmental tactics to encourage return migration emphasized maintaining migrants’ loyalty to their home country, a path that appeared to justify, at least to them, governmental surveillance and intervention abroad, particularly surveillance of Slavic national activity in the United States. “Patriotism” became the primary criterion in assessing which migrants were most desirable to attempt to lure back.

Several Austro-Hungarian governmental divisions entertained a number of plans in the two decades before World War I to bring migrants home, many of which fell under the auspices of Hungary’s established “American Action” program. “Unlike its Austrian counterpart,” diplomat and scholar Rudolf Agstner wrote, “the Hungarian government actually bore the cost of repatriating its co-nationals.” One Hungarian official justified the expense by arguing that it was necessary to “prevent the depopulation of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen.”8 The easiest proposal was simply to subsidize return journeys for migrants. Several small cohorts of travelers made use of these direct subsidies, most notably “families left destitute by the incapacitation or death of their principal breadwinner” in industrial or mining accidents.9 These were only the most modest of much more extensive return migration campaigns, which attempted to address a much wider array of governmental priorities related to land ownership and the development of Hungarian industry.

Although return migrants could help mitigate some of Austria-Hungary’s population decline from transatlantic emigration, they also posed threats to the imperial order. Some return migrants were inevitably at odds politically with the government. This was especially true of Slavic-language-speaking migrants who had developed a stronger sense of nationalism and opposed the Monarchy’s privileging of German-language and Hungarian-language institutions, and, more broadly, migrants who had begun to espouse more democratic beliefs in their attitudes toward government. The proliferation of separatist nationalism, democratism, and socialism were all threats that the Austro-Hungarian government considered carefully in crafting return migration campaigns.

Return migrants could help or hurt the government both economically and politically: emigration could drain labor and population, but it was also a source of remittances; a return migrant might be someone who had failed in America, or someone who brought back skills and capital to invest in the homeland economy. This spectrum of economic outcomes made it sometimes difficult for governmental officials to decide how to act with regard to emigration and how to spin the economic arguments for return migration. According to one ambassadorial report written in the late summer of 1908, return migrants were “handsomely equipped with money,” while other reports indicated that most of the migrants returning to Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) brought back far less money than they had left with and that the return of a few well-off individuals heavily inflated the average. Migrants who had been in the United States for three, four, or even twelve years were returning with just 6,000 crowns. In one batch of return migrants, 298 brought money back, while 129 did not, raising the real concern that they might require public assistance. Lean financial times in the U.S. after the Panic of 1907 prompted fears of a “panicky return migration.”10

Hungarian governmental officials were eager to circulate tales of migrants’ poor fortunes in the United States to discourage further emigration. The Kivándorlási Ellenőr (Emigration Monitor) and Kivándorlási Értesitő (Emigration Bulletin) newspapers were brimming with stories of migrants’ failures, from the penury of return migrants to unfortunate cases of migrants who suffered or even perished on the ship crossing the Atlantic. An article entitled “Things to Know” warned, “everyone is mistaken who hopes that as soon as they arrive in America, they will find work and that employers will be grasping for them.” It further cautioned that steam and electricity had already made many manual workers superfluous and that employers were responding to bad economic conditions in 1903 by “strongly reducing their business and releasing workers.” The ranks of the “desperate” and “unemployed” were expanding at a “frightening rate.”11 Other issues of the Kivándorlási Értesitő shared statistics concerning mass unemployment in American cities.12 Reports of migrants’ successes, like Ambassador László Hengelmüller von Hengervár’s 1908 report emphasizing their accumulated wealth, threatened to arouse “suspicion” about the governments’ gloomy reports on migrants’ misfortunes. In much the same way that the government subsidized migrant papers friendly to the Monarchy in the United States, so too could they subsidize papers devoted to migration news that aligned with their interests.

The politics of emigration and return migration intersected powerfully with nationality politics. Hungarian governmental efforts to encourage return migration explicitly strove to maintain the narrow majority of Hungarian-speakers in the kingdom. Fifty-four percent of the population was primarily Hungarian-speaking according the 1910 census, though this figure was as low forty-eight percent according to some other estimates (if Croatia was included), and this worried officials in Budapest.13 In the quest to nurture Hungarian-speaking communities, the promotion of patriotism and “Hungarianness” largely overlapped and were easily intertwined (at least to a point). However, Hungary’s efforts to manage migrant patriotism and return migration were not completely limited to people whom they considered ethnically Hungarian. Some officials sometimes promoted the return of Hungary’s Slavic, German, and other migrants to the countryside, as long as they were “patriotic.” But other officials contended that simply excluding national minorities from return migration campaigns was more expedient. In the end, Hungarian governmental programs that prioritized the return migration of Hungarian speakers prevailed because they both addressed the goals of repatriation and gave the authorities a stronger position in homeland population engineering. Debates within the government show the discrepancies between theory and practice, as transnational contests for identity lost out to the easier task of attaining national goals through exclusion.

Interested parties in the United States recognized that for many immigrants migration was temporary and that a sizeable minority would return home. As in Austria-Hungary, officials, employers, and shapers of public opinion in the United States disagreed on whether to accept the status quo of cyclical migration, prevent more immigrants from arriving in the first place, or make stronger efforts to mold arrivals into new Americans. Although economic conditions in the United States and migrants’ own work and family factors played a much more decisive role than Hungarian governmental initiatives, debates about return migration and its relationship to economic, political, and diplomatic questions offer examples of the ways in which the Hungarian government attempted to adapt to the era of mass transatlantic migration.

Labor, Land, and Money

Issues of loyalty and nationality mattered in discussions of return migration, but issues of livelihood, labor, and land were also crucial, and they involved a host of Austro-Hungarian governmental agencies in the return migration campaign. Austria-Hungary’s joint Foreign Ministry coordinated with officials at Ellis Island and worked with local institutions in New York City to house migrants traveling in both directions. Hungary’s Ministry of Religion and Public Instruction worked actively in the United States to maintain migrants’ loyalty in America. The governmental monopoly awarded to the Central Ticket Office (CTO) for steamship passage sales attempted to keep the profits earned in the business of emigration in Hungary, enriching some members of the Hungarian parliament who invested in the CTO.14 When it came to return migration, other governmental agencies also became part of the effort. Hungary’s Ministry of Agriculture looked to return migrants as prospective buyers for the surplus land owned by aristocrats whose fortunes were declining, and the national postal service sought to get a share of the profits of migrant remittances.

Many Eastern European individuals’ earning potential at home was limited by the availability of land, the paucity of local jobs outside of agriculture, and high taxes on small landholdings. These factors pushed them abroad in search of work and wages to pay the taxes on their land at home. These interrelated issues of work, land ownership, and taxes in Hungary emerged whenever governmental officials examined the choices made by individual migrants. Migrants complained to Dr. János Baross of the National Hungarian Economic Association that the taxes on their small farms, just 3 to 10 “hold” of land, were higher than the value of their estates. “Those among us who do not have land are much happier than those who do,” explained migrant András Vojtoka of Csicser (in Ung County, today Cičarovce in Slovakia) “The day laborer earns what he needs to live, unburdened by taxes or debt, but we,” Vojtoka continued, “could no longer bear the expenses.” Baross confirmed to his colleagues that day laborers probably had it easier than smallholders with “dwarf” estates; the “over-fragmentation and pulverization of peasant estates” was among the main causes of migration, not just in Vojtoka’s home county but across the whole uplands region and, indeed, the whole country.15 When the Prime Minister’s Office surveyed sheriffs in counties with high rates of emigration about what could be done to curtail it, many responded, not surprisingly, that villagers frequently returned of their own accord once they could afford to purchase land holdings large enough both to sustain them and enable them to meet their tax burdens.16

Questions about return migration featured a complicated interplay between agricultural and industrial work. As much as government officials bemoaned the emigration of workers, many workers were leaving precisely because there were too many of them for the available positions; that very fact made it difficult to prevail on them to return. The Trade Minister reported to Prime Minister István Tisza in 1905 that vocational workers had left Hungary mainly from the steel and machine sectors because of a surplus of workers; were the government to succeed in bringing them home, as the Prime Minister sought to do, it would be impossible for them to find work in steel and machinery jobs because there was a surplus of available labor in these industries.17 It was pointless for the government to target industrial workers for return migration unless it wanted to invest first in expanding the steel and machine industries to employ them. A subsequent note in the Prime Minister’s office files referred to the reality of the Trade Minister’s conclusions as “unpleasant,” and his report was archived.18 Seemingly intent on having a reason to entice skilled industrial workers home anyway, the government instructed the Hungarian Industrialists’ National Association to survey factories and identify those in need of “trustworthy and hard-working” return migrant employees.19 The political will to encourage return migration, in this case, was clearly far more important than any real economic need.

Until 1906, the government’s efforts had “endeavored only to keep the desire to return migrate alive,” but it had not yet implemented return initiatives.20 As the government’s efforts shifted from theoretical to practical, their priorities also shifted more from migrants’ national sentiments to their pocketbooks. In laying out the return migration operation to the Foreign Ministry, officials consistently emphasized concentrating return migration programs on migrants who had accumulated wealth in the United States. Hungary’s return migration campaigns did feature some elements to rescue unfortunate migrants from penury abroad, but they far more actively sought to entice economically successful migrants to return home and enrich the country.

The return migration proposal of the Ministry of Agriculture from 1907/08 is particularly worthy of note as an example of the government’s concrete effort to promote return migration. The central question was this: “How could we most practicably, avoiding state intervention, sell land to Hungarians in America ... and thus, through resettlement, somewhat offset emigration?”21 The greatest enticement to make this “come true” rather than be an “empty desire,” according to the Ministry, was to “plant opportunities for return.” This meant concerted programs to provide not simply lands but estates.22 One Ministry of Agriculture official proposed having the state unofficially buy available properties and sell them to Hungarian Americans, factoring in some of the management costs incurred by the state. The favored alternative plan, which eliminated some of the potential corruption of the government essentially engaging in land trafficking, was for the Ministry to create a compendium of parcels for sale, with information on how much was required in down payment or how much could be taken out in loans.23 In the end they decided to contract out the Ministry of Agriculture’s program to a non-governmental entity,24 either the Magyar Gazdaszövetség (Hungarian Farmers’ Association), an organization of medium-sized gentry and peasant landholders, or the Julian Society, which had done resettlement work among Hungarian-speakers to Hungary from Slavonia and Bosnia.

The Hungarian Farmers’ Association did indeed take up the task of “easing the acquisition of estates” for return migrants from the United States.25 Familiarity with their “patriotic activities” helped them secure the right to run the program.26 The program was initially contracted for a few years, with a 30,000 crown yearly allowance.27 Potential return migrants would be assessed for their suitability for the Ministry of Agriculture’s resettlement program according to their “financial situation” (the ability to put down a 50 percent down payment) and also their “psychological morale/mood,” essentially their potential for re-assimilation and their patriotism.28 The benefits of formulating a return migration program thus served nationalist, social, and economic goals. Selling estates or even somewhat parceled estates to return migrants for cash, rather than to local peasants, would be significantly less disruptive to local class hierarchies, avoiding the unpleasantness of estate-holders having to sell their lands piecemeal to locals who might have worked on the lands themselves. It also furthered Hungary’s intended trajectory of increasingly mechanized agriculture.

The implementation of the government’s return migration program required sending trustworthy agents to larger Hungarian settlements in the United States to find individuals open to relocating back to Hungary and wealthy enough to purchase land. Utmost care would have to be taken to find agents capable of practicing great discretion so that they would not spark controversy over return migration propaganda.29 Governmental officials initially planned to use U.S.-resident ministers and priests already receiving stipends from the Austro-Hungarian government to preach return migration from the pulpit. Officials proposed either a commission system based on the value of the land they sold (a proposal that was later rejected), raises for ministers for each of their congregants who repatriated, or some other form of financial incentive.30 But some recognized that this would not actually be in the ministers’ best interests, since the size of their congregations directly affected the financial health of the church and their personal salaries. Indeed, Member of Parliament Silvestri reported from Cleveland, Ohio that summer that the ministers in the area, even those receiving a government stipend, “would not gladly recruit” candidates for return migration, since doing so would, “in the long run, undermine the very position of their parishes.”31

Instead, the Hungarian Farmers’ Association used its own agent in North America, a certain János Skotthy, to run the program, with very modest success. The Kivándorlási Ellenőr reported in 1908 that 200 Hungarian migrants in the United States had applied to buy land under the Hungarian Farmers’ Association’s program, and that they planned to extend the program to more Hungarians in the U.S., along with Hungarians living in Romania, Bulgaria, and Bukovina.32 The paper further reported that sixty-two properties/estates were for sale at the time.33 Government-assisted return migration had become a reality, but one extremely limited in scope. Skotthy spent a month traveling around the United States trying to recruit migrants to buy land and return home, but with disappointing results. While many applied for the program, as the Ellenőr had reported, few were willing actually to commit to return migration. Hungarian Farmers’ Association director and Member of Parliament István Bernát pessimistically reported that “few proceed[ed] past the application stage,” either because the applicants did not actually desire to go home and buy land or were holding out for the state to “truly, caressingly, bait them home,” essentially with better economic terms.34

The lack of immediate success with Skotthy’s first round of recruitment encouraged the Ministry of Agriculture and the Hungarian Farmers’ Association to ponder difficult questions about the relationship between migration, love of country, land, and security. What was the relationship between encouraging return migration and the land hunger among peasants back in Hungary? Why was it that some migrants were willing to buy farms on the other side of the world in the United States, but if and when they returned to Hungary they only wanted to live in the place where they were born? Did American farms produce better incomes and offer a more stable living than estates at home?35

The relative lack of interest in governmental return migration programs among migrants in the United States encouraged the Hungarian government to explore expanding the program to Canada. There, one official concluded that success seemed much more promising on account of Hungarians’ reported inability to get used to the “inclement” weather and the much greater gender imbalance than among Hungarian-speaking migrants to the United States. Encouraging return migration from Canada had the added benefit, for the Ministry of Agriculture’s program, that in Canada a far higher proportion of migrants were working in agriculture than in industry, and they were “weathered in body and soul to hard field labor.” They were now skilled specifically in “machine-driven intensive husbandry” and they could become “master” models for the surrounding area’s population at home.36 Implied, but unstated, in the report is that migrant farmers in Canada could more readily imagine a future as farmers in Hungary than industrial workers in the United States, who had much more varied goals beyond a future in agriculture.

Most migrants, in the end, based their decisions to return on family, economic, and work-related factors, not governmental enticement. Rather than being discouraged by their time in the United States, the majority of those who returned, even if they ideally would have stayed, were of “pretty good morale.” In a governmental study on the “psychological mood” of return migrants, many blamed the poor work opportunities specifically on the presidential election in the United States in 1908. They were optimistic and of the opinion that in a short time jobs would be plentiful again. Other migrants, however, were quite disappointed by their migration experiences or continuing poor fortunes; they were referred to as “Die Amerikamüden,” the “weary Americans.” The report indicated that “sloth” and “an aversion to work” had probably contributed to their lack of success in the United States and continued troubles upon arriving home, contributing to their psychological inability to “enhappy” themselves. The most important finding of the study was that return migrants would migrate again if they believed that conditions in the United States to find work improved.37 Thus, even as the government worked to encourage migrants to return to their homeland, even this small survey indicated that the cycle of movement would simply begin again. Psychological factors had little salience compared to opportunities for work.

Bringing Home the “Patriotic” Migrant: Return Migrants and Homeland Politics

The primary characteristic of desirable return migrants, like good citizens, in the first decade of the twentieth century was that they were hazafias (patriotic), i.e. a good son of the homeland. Hungarian officials sending correspondence across the Atlantic in both directions frequently signed their letters, “with patriotic affection.” Every priest or minister that the Hungarian government sent to shepherd flocks of the religious faithful in the United States was assessed, first and foremost, on the basis of their patriotism, their faithfulness not only to church doctrines but to the principles of the home government. It is no surprise, then, that this concept of patriotism, so ubiquitous in other realms of governmental rhetoric, would be prominent in return migration campaigns as well. Officials sought to restore the country in population and in spirit. It is no surprise, also, that migrants who did not fit governmental definitions of patriotism would be excluded to whatever degree possible from return migration campaigns.

Expectations for migrant patriotism were not completely consistent between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the Habsburg Monarchy. Officials in Austria formulated their assessments of migrant loyalty primarily on the basis of being friendly toward the Monarchy, Monarchiefreundlich, as opposed to Hungary’s hazafias. Both concepts avoided ethnic criteria as their foundation, as was befitting of a multinational state, but the Hungarian concept of patriotism suggested a more active love of and identification with the country. Austria’s articulation of friendliness toward the monarchy allowed for a greater perception of ethnic difference and rested on an acceptance of the status quo in imperial power. (Though seeing eye-to-eye with the government became an aspect of crucial importance in the Hungarian definition of patriotism, too.)

Among return migrants, the most studied and most vulnerable to harassment by homeland officials were men who emigrated without having completed their compulsory military service in the Austrian or Hungarian army. The literature on return migrants imprisoned for draft evasion is extensive.38 But in terms of governmental efforts to expand return migration, the government’s enemies were not wayward would-be soldiers, but migrants who held nationalist views that challenged Austrian and Hungarian control in the Monarchy. Rising Slavic nationalisms in the United States, which had strained relationships with the Hungarian government, and more established contacts among Hungarian-speakers made Hungarian-speakers the overwhelmingly prioritized targets of the major return migration initiatives. On the practical side, Hungarian governmental agencies had the most ties in places that already had Hungarian-speaking Reformed and Greek Catholic institutions in the United States, many of which they supported with stipends, initially involving Roman Catholics only incidentally in some plans;39 in 1908, officials sought to include Hungarian Roman Catholic priests in the effort as well.40 Utilizing existing channels for a somewhat controversial program made the expenses more palatable.

But the targeting of Hungarian-speakers for return migration was about more than just practicality; despite initial intentions for ethnic inclusivity in return migration recruiting, the efforts quickly displayed overt elements of anti-Slavic prejudice, making plain the goal of population engineering. By advertising governmental return migration initiatives to certain segments of the Monarchy’s migrants and not others, the government could recoup some of the losses of emigration in ways that protected the majorities of Hungarian-speakers or added to their numbers in communities where they constituted a minority. This was true on the national level and in more localized calculations. The Interior Ministry identified Transylvania, for example, as an important region to encourage the return migration of Hungarian-speakers, to increase their proportion compared to Romanian-speakers.41

Even in the Ministry of Agriculture’s plans, in which strengthening the country’s agricultural sector would supposedly be the paramount goal, concerns about Slavic nationalism were front and center. Minister of Agriculture Ignácz Darányi explained to István Bernát of the Hungarian Farmers’ Association that migrants from the linguistic minorities of northern Hungary should be excluded from purchasing land through the return migration programs explicitly because of their alleged pan-Slavic views. “Since the return of emigrated Slovaks is estimated at 19 percent, these people with Pan-Slavic ideas slowly infest Felvidék (Hungary’s northern counties, today mostly in Slovakia) in this territory, which is already exposed from a nationality standpoint—with the return of Ruthenians with Great Russian ambitions,” he explained.42 “Strict adherence” to this stipulation was critically important, he noted, because

our emigrants’ repatriation could easily produce the sad outcome that, with the Hungarian state’s help, elements that stand in opposition to the Hungarian state idea would return, and these elements would close out from land acquisition those ...who represent the most acceptable material for settlement.43

It was essential for “the protection of our moral world” to exclude Slavic-language emigrants who had been touched by “Pan-Slavic agitation” abroad.

In a letter to Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle in 1908, Darányi excluded Hungary’s Slavic-language and German-speakers alike. “Among our Slav-speaking emigrants …, such exceptionally strong Pan-Slavic agitation is taking place that the assisted return of these people … is not bearable from the standpoint of the Monarchy’s nationality situation or the Hungarian state’s nationality/minority domestic peace.” While German-speaking Swabians in Hungary were, from a nationality standpoint, of “good feeling,” “the emigrated Swabians in the United States naturally melted into the existing populous/large colony, where ... alldeutsch [pan-German] operations are taking place.” Thus, German-speakers would also be excluded from this first repatriation effort.44 While the Ministry of Agriculture’s return migration program had begun overwhelmingly concerned with issues of land and the liquid capital of American return migrants, by 1908, the program had taken on a powerful nationalist purpose under Darányi.

Hungarian officials were concerned not only about the return of physical individuals promoting pan-Slavism or Slavic nationalism, but also about writings by Slavic nationalists being sent home. The Hungarian government had several tools at its disposal to try to mitigate the effects of the return of undesirable people and materials. Local officials were asked to report on the reappearance of specific individuals, as well as people who received mailings of known Slavic-American publications that agitated against the Monarchy. Alongside the presses in Prague and Túrócszentmárton (today Martin in Slovakia), officials identified presses in the United States as the sources of newspapers, journals, and pamphlets distributed by the “American Pan-Slavic anti-national movement.” One policy adviser insisted to the Minister of Commerce that “preventative measures” be taken, because by the time these materials fell into readers’ hands it was too late to do anything about them. The postal service, he advised, should track the return addresses of Czech-language materials coming to Slovak-speaking areas of Hungary from America and Austria and, if possible, obtain a list of subscribers to censor them more surgically.45

In addition to separatist nationalism, return migrants returned home with other political ideologies that homeland officials considered undesirable or threatening, regardless of the migrants’ professed nationality. Many of the changes that migrants generally underwent in the United States were shared by Hungarian-speakers and Slavic-language-speakers: changes in economic condition, heightened political consciousness and a growing desire for a more democratic Hungary, and heightened modern class consciousness from having worked in an industrial setting. Too radical a position in any of these areas was thought to make migrants less amenable to life back home and potentially a threat, and thus subject to surveillance and harassment by local authorities upon their return.46 “Patriotism” thus signaled a non-threatening stance in nationality politics, i.e. a record clean of activism in anything that could be labeled pan-Slav, as well as a non-threatening stance with regards to the political and social status quo more broadly.

In Austria-Hungary, a host of political orientations was deemed threatening to the status quo, from democracy to socialism. “You could see ...that [migrants] returned with new social ideas rather tinged with socialism,” one councilor reported to the prime minister in 1909. The examples he gave of this, however, were merely demanding “humane treatment” and their elation at being referred to by honorific titles like “Mr.” even by authorities in the United States.47 The social leveling that Austro-Hungarian officials feared from return migrants was less of an immediate threat but more of a long-term one. On the whole, before World War I, migrants did not actively seek to revolutionize Hungary’s class structure and political system on their visits home, but they did support more democratically inclined candidates, like Count Mihály Károlyi, and they started to envision a more democratic future for Austria-Hungary. The consequences of return migration for separatist nationalism were apparent much more quickly, especially with the outbreak of World War I.

Return Migration and International Politics

Prevailing on migrants to return was a priority in Hungarian foreign affairs, but it was not without diplomatic dangers. The Ministry of Agriculture’s proposals from 1905 to 1910 were extensively debated in governmental circles, taking “great care and forethought” to avoid anything that would create “conflict with the American government.”48 Nevertheless, the status of return migrants was among the greatest points of contention between the Austro-Hungarian and U.S. governments, and it constituted a significant portion of the activity of U.S. consuls based in Austria-Hungary. Interstate conversations about the mobility and citizenship of return migrants were complicated by questions of whether return migrants were back in Europe for the time being or for good. As Nicole Phelps, a scholar of U.S.–Habsburg foreign relations, has found, massive transatlantic migration prompted an international debate over the degree to which a home government’s sovereignty expanded to its citizens abroad. To resolve these tricky issues, officials in both countries thus attempted to align migrants’ physical location with their land of citizenship.49 All in all, American and Austro-Hungarian officials had nearly identical goals with regard to migrants (to make them loyal members of their country), which thus put them in competition for return migrants throughout the course of migrants’ back-and-forth travels. The fact remained that, in Hungary’s attempts to lure migrants back from the United States, some degree of conflict with the American government over the proper jurisdiction of specific individuals was inevitable.

Austria-Hungary’s compulsory military service was central to the controversies about the return migration and citizenship of military-aged men. Austro-Hungarian and American agreements on naturalization were laid out in an 1870 treaty, which exempted migrants who acquired American citizenship from outstanding military commitments at home, but thousands of migrants who made return visits were not yet full citizens and thus not covered by this treaty. And while migrants who had become American citizens were legally exempt from Austro-Hungarian military duty on their return to Europe, some officials nevertheless harassed them, especially at the local level. Migrants returning to Austria-Hungary with a U.S. passport or other documentary proof of citizenship were fairly easy to free if they were detained by European officials for evasion of military service. Those who had only filed “first papers” for citizenship, however, were not yet full citizens and often not granted assistance from American officials. Migrants who had worked in the United States and become citizens, but who had returned to Europe for over two years and had no proof of intention to travel back, were considered permanent return migrants and could rarely receive the American consular assistance they desired. If a migrant’s return to Europe was permanent, according to two new acts of the U.S. Congress in 1906 and 1907, their American citizenship could be withdrawn.50 With no international standard on dual citizenship, citizenship’s expiration, or expatriation, American and European officials were often left to negotiate cases on an individual basis. “Many naturalized citizens of Polish, Croatian, Hungarian or other origin, return to their counties of their nationality for the purpose of taking up their permanent abode therein and when the question of their military service is involved endeavor to obtain protection under the cloak of forfeited American citizenship,” U.S. consul to Vienna Ulysses Grant-Smith complained.51

American consular officials were rather dismissive of return migrants who had failed to meet the expectations of American citizenship and embroiled themselves in politics at home. American nativists and proponents of immigration restriction might well have been glad to see migrants return to Europe once injured or too old to work in the United States, and thus not become a public burden, but the preference was overwhelmingly that migrants, while they could retain cultural affection for their homeland, reassign their political allegiance to the United States. These ideas put Austro-Hungarian return migration campaigns directly at odds with Americanization efforts in the United States.

American efforts to keep Austro-Hungarian migrants in the United States ebbed and flowed with changes in industrial labor demands and with the contest between nativists and their opponents, including progressives and socialists. While American nativists applauded the return of every emigrant to their place of birth, the views of Americans sympathetic to migration was more varied. U.S. Special Immigration Inspector Marcus Braun, born in Hungary and a migrant to the U.S. himself, lambasted the Hungarian government’s interventionism in the United States in his 1906 pamphlet Immigration Abuses: Glimpses of Hungary, specifically critiquing Hungary’s efforts to lure migrants home. He suggested that Hungarian officials believed the following about migrants: “Let us prevent them from remaining there for good and let us insist that their stay out there be but temporary; let us insist that they, instead of becoming Hungarian-Americans, remain American-Hungarians,” Braun mocked. “And when they have earned enough to pay off the mortgages on their farms [in Austria-Hungary] and their debts to the usurers, and have saved up enough to begin life anew,” he continued, “let us receive them with open arms and kill the biblical fatted calf in honor of their return.”52

Conclusion

While the Hungarian government’s interest in migrant loyalty and patriotism remained consistent, its direct influence on return migration was limited. Count Miklós Bánffy, an ardent proponent of return migration, was so disappointed by the lack of success by 1910 that he dejectedly suggested either making a final push for the return migration campaign or abandoning it altogether, despite it having been one of his favored initiatives for several years.53 Bánffy wrote the Prime Minister, Count Károly Khuen-Héderváry, that the administration had two choices: “Either to give up the action’s resettlement branch once and for all and, in this vein, gradually decrease and completely end the action,” or, “with a strong hand, to compensate for the previous years’ shortcomings, initiate broad-ranging socio-political, population, and homeland action, into which the Americans’ resettlement could be inserted.” Bánffy considered the latter the “only proper road open to the government.”54 Chastising the prime minister for having failed to support the endeavor properly, Bánffy closed his letter “with anxious patriotic feeling,” urging Khuen-Héderváry to recognize the matter’s “undelayable importance” and to act “without further delinquent omission.”55

The American Action program continued to promote loyalty to Hungary through World War I and even beyond into the early 1920s, hoping to bring migrants home. This effort largely failed. In the Hungarian Parliament at the outset of 1916, members of Parliament, already looking ahead to the end of the war, believed that there were “large numbers of Hungarians” who would “return to their mother country after the war.”56 Member of Parliament and economics professor at University of Budapest Béla Földes asserted that “Hungarians now in America did not feel at home there,” presumably due to discrimination against Hungarians as aggressors in the war, and that they should be “the first to be repatriated” and given opportunities to succeed upon their return.57

While many migrants who had intended their stay in the United States to be temporary were essentially trapped in America for the duration of the war, such a movement for mass return migration was wishful thinking in early 1916 and far from accurate by the end of the war almost three years later. The outbreak of war completely transformed the circumstances surrounding return migration. The extended period of time migrants spent in the United States during the war itself and the benefits of Americanization during the conflict ensured that thousands of Eastern European migrants who had intended their stay in America to be temporary would become permanent residents. Furthermore, the war itself destroyed huge swaths of territory and the Paris settlement at the end of the war dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a series of distinct nation-states, putting many migrants’ home villages outside of the states with which they identified with ethnically, discouraging many of them from returning. The introduction of restrictive immigration legislation in the United States likewise affected migrants’ decisions, as what had once been a revolving door became a gate, however porous, in the interwar era. With restrictions in place, many so-called “birds of passage” migrated back and forth far less than they had earlier in the century, fearing that the gates might close more tightly behind them. As mass emigration from Austria-Hungary to the United States declined, so, too, did mass return migration.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Archive of the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, Politisches Archiv

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Newspapers

Magyar Nemzet, 1908

Kivándorlási Ellenőr, 1908

Kivándorlási Értesítő, 1903

 

Secondary Sources

A Felvidéki kivándorlási kongresszus tárgyalásai, megtartatott Miskolczon... [Discussions of the Emigration Congress of the Upper Lands, held in Miskolc…]. Országos Magyar Gazdasági Egyesület. Budapest: Pátria, 1902.

A magyar szentkorona országainak 1910. évi népszámlálása. Első rész... [The 1910 census of the lands of the Hungarian Holy Crown. Part I…]. Budapest: Magyar Királyi Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1912.

Agstner, Rudolf. “From Apalachicola to Wilkes-Barre: Austria(-Hungary) and its Consulates in the United States of America, 1820–1917.” Austrian History Yearbook 37 (2006): 163–80. 

Benkart, Paula K. “The Hungarian Government, the American Magyar Churches, and Immigrant Ties to the Homeland, 1903–1917.” Church History 52, no. 1 (1983): 312–21.

Braun, Marcus. Immigration Abuses: Glimpses of Hungary and Hungarians: A Narrative of the Experiences of an American Immigrant Inspector while on Duty in Hungary, Together with a Brief Review of that Country’s History and Present Troubles. New York: Pearson Advertising Co., 1906.

Brunnbauer, Ulf. Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.

Kramár, Zoltán. From the Danube to the Hudson: U.S. Ministerial and Consular Dispatches on Immigration from the Habsburg Monarchy, 1800–1950. Atlanta: Hungarian Cultural Foundation, 1978. 

Phelps, Nicole M. U.S.–Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Puskás, Julianna. Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: 100 Years of the Hungarian Experience in the United States. New York: Holmes & Meir, 2000.

Puskás, Julianna. Overseas Migration from East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, 1880–1940. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990.

Puskás, Julianna. From Hungary to the United States (1880–1914). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983.

Puskás, Julianna. Kivándorló Magyarok az Egyesült Államokban [Emigrant Hungarians in the United States]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982.

Steidl, Annemarie, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James W. Oberly. From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017.

U.S. Secretary of Labor, Eleventh Annual Report.... Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923.

Wyman, Mark. Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Zahra, Tara. The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Present Times Concerning Things Past: On Recent Conceptions of Memory

Zoltán Hidas

Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Institute of Sociology

 

„Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren
Sich weiß Rechenschaft zu geben,
Bleib im Dunkeln unerfahren,
Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.”

J. W. v. Goethe

After sketching modern experiences and visions of historicity, the present study outlines two fundamental modes of our relationship to present time and memory. In an ideal typical way, two theoretical conceptions are contrasted for this purpose. A radical system theory of time presumes that there has been a rupture in the human temperament, which has opened our understanding of time functionally by focusing in an accelerating manner on the future. The cultural memory paradigm asserts the existence of the individual as a genuine part of remembering communities, who draws orientations from the past. In the terms of the Hegelian philosophy of history, we have here the pragmatic representation of the past for the sake of efficiency on the one hand and the search for an internal order of the most heterogeneous events for the sake of discovering continuity in human activity on the other.

Keywords: philosophy of history, system theory, cultural memory, relation to the past, presentism

In this essay, I pose questions concerning time and, more narrowly, the ways in which, recently, we have come, essentially, to relate to our memories. I begin with a presentation of the modern shift in historical conciousness (1) and then, based on a theoretical design outlined by G.W.F. Hegel in his philosophy of history (2), offer a discussion of two fundamentally different concepts of time and memory which strive to grasp in a consistent ideal-typical way the potentials of the modern era for assessing perspectives of time. Both take the present as their point of departure, but they assign different roles to the past. One presumes that there has been a rupture in the human temperament (3), while the other firmly asserts the existence of the individual as a genuine part of communities (4). Among the ways in which we relate to past, a third possibility also recurringly appears, but it seeks a radical withdrawal from the world of events.

Modern Experiences and Visions of Historicity

In an era marked by a seemingly infinite proliferation of differences which, according to diagnoses based on the most varied approaches, break the inner and outer human world into spheres that seem increasingly independent of one another, a longing for continuity and interconnection among the pieces emerges with renewed strength. In a life-world of “contingency” and “fragmentation”, which on a temporal horizon that has been brought into motion both sensually and spiritually strike an era named (without any classification of events based on content) modernity, the search for orientation falters between the present and the past in order to gain perspective for the future, which is regarded as open. But neither the present, which is permanently in motion, nor the past, which is seen as inexhaustible, offers any certainties that seem beyond doubt.1

Of course, these empiric and semantic changes of historicity only cause problems of immediate urgency for a manner of relating to the world that seeks to situate itself in time, as it were. Greek antiquity significantly aspired to attain solid models (“ideas” and “forms”) considered eternal and therefore worthy of imitation, so that it could realize them in evanescent time. The Judeo-Christian notion of divine “providence” sacralized some of the events of the world into a story of redemption, but it could only give them religious significance with the appeal to faith in the idea that “nothing happens except by the will of God.” For the early Christian, the existence of the Roman empire was for the most part an uninteresting contingency: the “heavenly city” was an inner issue.2 The man of the time did not have a developed sense of the theological significance of the prevailing order of the imperial milieu, much as there was no real recognition of the thought of the broad historical horizon and the fertile social soil as a potential sociological precondition of the spread of the new religion. Anticipations aligned with the presence of the “end of times,” which seemed to be prefigured and were indeed institutionally represented. The primary reference points of memory, however, were given by the correlation of the history of the Jewry, which was led by God, to the events of the last days in the life of Jesus as promises fulfilled.

As the Western world becomes increasingly open to purely secular approaches (on the basis in part of its own—political, scientifical etc.—efforts and in part of the gradual consent of religion),3 for a long time people thought to find valid handholds in time, seeing themselves on the heights of development as they progressed along a path from a rudimentary but clearly identifiable past to a valuable near-future, designated from the outset. The philosophy of history projects of the modern era unfold the large-scale whole that continues to hold together the spheres of the world that function according to independent principles: global economic growth, global political unification attains in the universal world history the consummation of the principles of humanity that are claimed and hoped to be general. History understood in the singular, as the notion of a unity that goes beyond the multitude of separate histories, can develop as the horizon of humanity, rich with meaning.4

From a rather formal perspective (in other words beyond geographical, historical, economic, and ideal elements), the birth of “modernity” seems just to begin with the discovery of temporality, understood in the strict sense: the future can be filled with acts that are seen as not bound to the past, in terms of the experience and anticipation of a kind of “never has been before.”5 The logical foundation of this idea and also its philosophical-historical cornerstone is an understanding of the original temporality of human existence. All this attains its fully developed form in the existentialist projects of the “moments” that require life-shaping decisions and personal “life plans,” as the task of the person “thrown into the world.”

Of course, the rise of a genuine historical consciousness always sees the phenomena of culture either as in an incipient form or in decline and ruin. The search for that what is generally valid is thrown into suspicion afresh by the always possible critique that can on its own terrain attack reason and rationality as the supposedly highest authority. Herder’s caution was made at a time when the most ambitious world history projects were forming: “in a certain respect, every human perfection is national, secular, and, if most closely considered, individual.”6 Thus, the questions concerning “essence” are replaced by the question concerning “formation” and “development”: metaphysics loses its priority of place to geneaology. The longing for the unified and the unconditional have ever since been washed away again and again by the unpredictable whirlpool of history, from which religious faith, which is increasinly considered irrational compared to the rationalities of the world, continues to seek a way out, stepping from the familiar relevances of the world of everyday life into other worlds of meaning.7 Reflection taken to the power of infinity has captured the generalness of principled thinking, and in its cunningness and refinement it is capable of finding—i.e. “reflecting”—everything in everything. The strength of and hope in unity is shattered by plurality, both in the inner and the outer worlds. What was once held to be the unity of reason unravels into a diversity of rationalities, which remain a worthy object of renewed attempts to make rational insights.8

The formula offered a century ago by Jacob Burckhardt, who pondered the nature of world history, today is only occasionally overwritten by visions of history garbed in scholarly guise: “history, that is coordination, is not-philosophy, and philosophy, that is subordination, is not-history.”9 Every exit from this circle of thought is “transcedence” in the most original sense of the word. Intellectual efforts to join the various worlds are given new momentum again and again by the human will for comprehensive unity and meaning.

The impossibility of an inner-worldly desertion from time, in other words the impossibility of a perspective that allows for total overview, makes reality accessible only through mediations and furthermore makes knowledge of that what happened a process that can never come to conclusion. Giving up on post-metaphysical aspirations that are bound to theories of knowledge or to the clarifying of the capabilities of human reason, the craft of interpretation, which comes near to the status of an art, gains ground under the label of “hermeneutics”. In the process of thinking on thinking, the one-time and present sights of the world appear as “concepts” or “visions” of the world. The relationship between facts and interpretations is increasingly reversed: according to the most logically consistent formula, “there is no such thing as a pure fact” and every fact is an interpretation from the outset.10 For reason, which itself is becoming a historically situated phenomenon, progressively unfolding world-understanding consistently proves to be renewed world-interpretation. Knowledge put into human molds is a world-transforming achievement. Thus, sources also do not speak for themselves, but always wait to be called on by the present to speak. Perspectives are offered by our own subjective relevances: setting out from them, the infinite plenitude of events, which in itself is structureless and unbroken, takes form. The way in which one relates to the past is always established in the present, and this makes it impossible, for reasons of principle, for consciousness today to draw a clear line between the two. If now it is not the past—the pure past, as it existed before it was discerned—that survives for the actual present, then the “enigma” of time is centered in the present, instead of the historical-philosohical future, which bore the hypothetical potential of fulfilling everything.

Saint Augustine’s famous arguments, which in his thinking still fit in the context of the development of an inner man who maintains a direct relationship with God, preshadow with a force that lasts to the present day our most modern way of relating to time: „But even now it is manifest and clear that there are neither times future nor times past. Thus it is not properly said that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present concerning things past; a time present concerning things present; and a time present concerning things future. For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them. The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is sight; the time present of things future is expectation.”11

According to this understanding, past, present, and future are three aspects of a present in which difference has arisen even with regards to itself. If time, as the “expansion of the soul”, is an inner matter for man, there is in principle nothing to prevent the internal rift of “time present concerning things present” from becoming deeper, and the reflective-intellectual work of centuries does indeed attain this. The transformation of the idea that everything has an ordained time and that the rhythm of events beats at a consistent tempo, into an eternal-human “form of observation” (Kant) was crowned by the notion of time as a continuously shifting pattern of human relations and our shared simultaneities and non-simultaneities as a well-articulated symbolic order.12 The present, which had once been regarded as a direct given, thus becomes the present of the “contemporary-world” (“Mitwelt”), invested with meanings, while the past that is suited to the present is a “predecessor-world” (“Vorwelt”), ever more distant in the generational chain and continuously shifting in its significance.13 The relationship to the past is humanly nurtured “culture”; the ever shifting manner of dealing with time is a question of “strategy.” According to this, the main question concerning our current manner of relating to the past—beyond the idea of mere mapping, which increasingly counts as little more than an illusion—is not the dependency of historical knowledge on point of view, but the actual weight of the present in comparison with what has taken place, or, conversely, the power of historical awareness to shape the present.

A Hegelian Typology of Grasping History

In the introduction to the most broad philosophical world history ever written, Hegel offers an overview of the possible ways of writing history. Thus, “reflexive history” goes beyond the naïve primitiveness of the great masters of history writing, who dissolved in their own present. This reflexive history extends from the simple anachronism through a pragmatic representation of the past to the search for the internal order and unity of events in a given circle of humanity. The philosophical approach, which supposes a reasonable progression of events, steps up onto the highest rung of history so that its presupposition prove necessarily true in the coherent progression of events and their presentation.

The treatment of the past, which was becoming a matter of scholarship, seeing the a-historical unfairnesses and totalistic consequences of absolute measures, devoted itself increasingly to the partial interconnections of inner-worldly events, and, in the thrall of “pure facts,” for a long time it considered the discovery of the “actual” events its primary task. Science, which was more sensitive to differences, ruptures, and ommissions, demonstrates the fictional nature of the intellectual edifices of unity. However, for self-reflective historical consciousness, a reading of the memory traces that have palpably survived increasingly proved a form of reconstructive work done on the basis of the sources. The abstractive gestures of science proceed from the primary constructions of the everyday world, constructions with which the debate community, which is skeptical of everyday evidence, is incapable of breaking entirely, its experience in practical “disinterestedness” notwithstanding.14 Because of the uninterruptible dialectic of terms and events, history writing that aspires towards universality itself remains in part in the sphere of influence of the retrospective “mastering of the past.” Any deposit of the past, whatever form it takes, cannot be definitive.

Regarding the hierarchy of cognizance established by Hegel, the paths to direct accessibility of events and the discernment of their necessity in the meantime have been obstructed. Two possible procedural perspectives remain in the potential spaces of recollection, more narrowly understood: the effectiveness of memories correlated to particular (economic, political, religious, or even artistic) partial presents in the respective environment and, on the other hand, the horizon of meaning of the commemorated past, again and again contoured from the present. Although both projects use the implements of historical criticism, the focus of the first is actuality, which ensures functionality, by excluding memories that are dispensable to this. The focus of the latter is the manifold presence of guarded and concealed pasts, and the derivation of the future from some kind of origin.15 As we will see, all this is not independent of our possible ways of relating to ourselves either.

According to an originally sociological insight, the sense of acceleration which comes from the proliferation of groups which transect one another in a single individual brings a new rhythm to the succession of events in the past and the succession of events today. The apocalyptic attitude bound the fulfillment of promises to the merciful arrival of the end times and the unexpected curtailing of history. Among the driving forces of the acceleration, which is also self-propelling, the faith in the expedient transformability of a progressive world is intertwined with the intensification of traffic and the proliferation of contacts. The increase in contents of consciousness for a single unit of time and the rapid change in patterns of behavior and associations have brought about an “intensification of sensed-life” and in general a fundamental transformation of human time.16 In any case, the shocking experience of the compression of the present, which is experienced as something in a continuous state of acceleration, assails with tremendous force the tradition of learning from continuous narratives.17 History loses its quality and role as teacher: expectations concerning the future cannot be derived on the basis of acquired experiences. The new present—according to the first project, which is becoming more and more dominant—selects the requisite accessories of functioning in the spirit of efficacy, if necessary even from the distant past. Our strategic use of time fits well into the frameworks of a manner of relating to the world based on domination—while in the servile dialectic of human and time it is increasinly difficult to find a handhold.

The Forgetful Memory of Efficacy

Let us consider for a moment the first option: systems theory sociologist Niklas Luhmann has provided the most consistent theoretical examination and at the same time self-reflective look at the pragmatic perspective. Each of the social system-worlds, which are increasingly separating from one another, is built on a particular distinction: according to a bivalent code, it selects or—more precisely—creates its own elements, events, and borders in its separation from its immeasurable environment. Science selects truth, economics selects the profitable, religion selects the transcendent in the face of falsehood, the unprofitable, and the immanent, and so on and so on in each of the various systems of the system-worlds. In the meantime, communication embraces the systems, which are closed within themselves, i.e. they are “self-referential”: the borders of the social world are denoted by the borders of communication. If continuity is thus nothing more than the bearing of the systems on themselves, then the task is the connection of the communicative acts that are just taking place to the previous ones in the interests of maintaining the own system.

The system functionings, however, are no longer structured into a unity by any central ordering project. In Luhmann’s model, the systemic place of identity is occupied ever more consistently by difference: the abstract and paradoxical fundamental principle is “the difference of identity and difference”.18 Correspondingly, the divergent motions, which since they were first discerned have been expressed with metaphors of “fragmentariness,” “fluidity,” and “mobility”, find structured theoretical form as “differentiation”. The systems, which become independent without any internal relation, live their own, separate times, so to speak, which for the personal experience of the world finds manifestation in the impossibility of harmonizing individually and communally the spheres of life. Various system times of varying pace and rhythm come into being between the cosmic world-time and the personal lifetime, which are of differing scales from the outset. The simultaneous multitide of non-simultaneous system presents compete for the inclusion of the communicating participants—i.e. even for their creation as communicational partners. For “psychical systems” (which were once called “consciousnesses”), which also count as independent (because they function within their own spheres of thought), participation in the various projects renders establishing and ordering themselves within the temporal differences of the many kinds of present an increasingly unmanageable task: hindering the dispersion of differentiation, in other words synchronizing the presents, is a challenge that puts the “psychical system” to the test. The increasingly fast-paced differentiation of the systems, which by this time are preoccuppied with themselves, place our own observational position (which distinguishes the task immediately to be performed from all tasks that must be neglected) under ever stronger pressure to select. “Not to act is lost time.”19 Complexity, which continues to build with ongoing differentiation, features the omitted selections as postponable. But while the future which belongs to the prevailing present becomes unattainable, as it were (and bears an ever larger quantity of decisions),20 it contracts and becomes increasingly short because of the increasingly uncertain expectations. The evolutionary logic of the process of variation, selection, and stabilization may imply temporality, but the necessity of maintaining the system does not tolerate delay.

In the present which has become permanent not only the “future cannot begin,”21 the continuous communicational uncertainties of the continued functioning of the systems make uncertain the status of the past. For the systems, “now”, which becomes ever shorter in the difference between “before” and “after”, borrows a kind of eternal present tense without duration: the diminuation of the duration of the elements to a point—already ephemeral in their moment of coming into being—is an elementary interest adequate to the irreversibility of time.22 If the present is now the paradoxical unity of the difference of the past and the future, the possible point of origin of novelty,23 then for the assurance of functionality the past appears less and less as the present reality of what has taken place. The past which has been chosen by the system as its own (a past which for a long time was called “tradition”) thus can reach the present, but its contents, depth, and pace contuinuously change according to the exigencies of the given present. For the time of the everyday, the ever-developing technology of data storage, which is increasingly incapable of forgetting, tends to account for historical time, while the appeal to history becomes an incidental question. For the principle of functionality, the historical-causal continuity of the past is merely a question of expedience. Because of the inexhaustibleness of causal interconnections, the selection of reasons that would be worthy of being taken into consideration in a given case falls, furthermore, to the incidental observer.24

If, however, in the compression of time the present continues to lose its expansure, how does the space for memory take form? The re-use of successful experiences—in other words the selection of what has been selected before, the repetition of tried and tested differentiations—of course is possible anytime under favorable circumstances; in this way, the self-regulating system wins time, so to speak. The intensification of complexity, however, increasingly hampers a purely redundant self-creation. Thus, according to the explanation given by the systems theory sociology of knowledge, instead of a differentiation between the tranquility of eternity and the restlessness of change, a model origin and uncertain transformations, in the historical approach of the modern era a temporalized self-description of society appears and comes to culmination. As we already know, history “comes into being if observation of socially important events is made with consideration of the difference of before and after.”25 Historical consciousness lets the present emerge out of the past, but—paradoxically—it founds the only possible identity on constantly shifting differences. Instead of spatiality, the semantics of temporality corresponds well to the functional differentiations of the social world: the sense for “formations” and the “processes” that gave rise to them (instead of the “essence” of “things”) and “originality” (instead of “origin”) become information for the present. Memory does not seek orientation simply in historical succession, but rather it makes its way towards an understanding of the past which makes the present visible as a “space for action,” in which the novelty of the future can be born of novelties past. The problems of the actual present are none other than the always peculiar differences between the past and the future. Seen from the perspective of systems theory, the demand for continuous rewriting of the past (a demand striving for originality) stems from the search for novelty hidden in the one-time evolutionary variations, i.e. ruptures.

Given all this, it is hardly coincidental that Luhmann closes his presentation of the eventually timeless evolutionary logic of systems with a discussion of memory.26 The presentism of system memory that prevails in the name of functionality makes selections from the endless material with consideration of the functioning of the given system: it forgets anything and everything that it doesn’t happen to need at the moment and remembers only the one thing that gives continued momentum to communication. Thus, the primary function of memory is, paradoxically, forgetting, even if the self-description of society continues to the present day to be wrong about this. The stakes are not the coherence of events, but rather the consistency of the systems which is open to new impulses and disturbances—a consistency, which in the social world sometimes can even be served by historical coherence. However, with the obstruction of forgetting, the culmination of earlier results into “identity” can lead to the destruction of the system. Recently, the concept of “culture” has been called on, as the horizon of comprehensive comparisons (instead of stable identity), to ensure at least similarity, in spite of every difference. Culture, as a vessel that is formless in and of itself, is supposed to receive world contents, but at most it is capable of duplicating them by their external observation. Today’s “culture” of the past is the memory of the social system, which of course is quite aware of its character as memory. This twofold reflection, the consideration of what has been bequeathed as tradition, sheds light on the double contingency of the particular past: that it could have evolved differently, and something else could have been selected. With ordered remembering (for instance the guidance of historical comparisons), culture tries to adapt to the increasingly complex social system-world. Systems thinking instead calls on us to observe “who uses what differentiations in order to offer his past for the future.”27

In society understood as communication, instead of the bearer of memory, whether personal or group, the media of memory become important.28 Writing steps past the narrow sphere of oral communication, which is bound to rites and formulas, and the potentials of repetition as means of maintenance. With its tremendous power to record, it makes the improbable probable and ensures the connection of the communicational events that are just beginning with those that preceded them. If time can no longer be organized by acts committed eye to eye, then “previous” events can be taken from the most distant past if a written trace of them has survived. Concrete time, wich comes into being in the duality of events transpiring and events completed, point-like and continuous, and is considered essentially spatial, is succeeded by the abstraction of the distance between eternity and temporality: the increasing validity of the increasingly distant texts thus creates transcendence. In the wake, however, of the process by which the revival from the archives of contents that were recorded earlier (in other words memory) becomes increasingly independent of the circumstances of their birth, not only do untouchable canons come into being, but, ever more distant from the sacral centers, the arbitrary application of the written word becomes possible. In recent times, the increasingly independent systems of the mass media have realized this potential, which was always inherent in writing, amidst circumstances of increasingly open access. Since everything that ever happened and is now happening can be present in an accessible manner for anyone in timeless simultaneity, the past counts exclusively as re-presentation. The communications that exist in a continuous present increasingly distinguish the information of “novelty” from the redundancies of that which is “old,” which is why it is increasingly difficult for the past to find any settled form.

Naturally, the logic of differences does not leave the deliberate observer (the participant in and observer of events) untouched. What was once “man” proves to be a plethora of systems: the internal life of his consciousness separates from his social participation in communicational systems on the basis of principle. Only the self-interpretations of eras that were built on less efficacious differentiations (up/down, us/them, man/world) could cling to the idea of the unified consistency and continuous content of people and groups.

The Committed Remembrance of Significance

Turning now to one of the characteristic recent versions of some internal order and unity of events, admidst the newest precepts of thinking concerning the possibilities of cognition, even the project of “cultural memory” can no longer abandon the perspective of the present. In an era of intensifying differences, however, the overview of the present can be ensured not only by the pragmatics of systemic persistence but also by passing the temporal paths that lead to us. By abandoning any unconditional cognition for its own sake, we make the past that is significant for us the object of our own perspectives. The designated objects are selected by interest that is alleged to be shared from the endless quantity of material. We mold the phenomena that surround us into some kind of unity with regard to their antecedents. In our time, with its eminent interest in history, the things that are thus uncovered also play a role in the memory of the world that lies beyond the scientific world, namely as a story built into the present. The present acts of memory in this approach evoke historical determinations or at least conditions. Jan Assmann opposes his own project of “cultural memory” with the presentism of forgetting, on the basis of the “non-simultaneity of that what is simultaneous”.29

“Tradition” is one of the antecedents of the search for historical continuity, i.e. the notion of preserving and passing on the bequeathed. The modern project of education and refinement (Bildung) as omni-sided self-development establishes as its goal both reception of the broadest register of cultural phenomena and the creative transformation of the world, seeking a balance between the two that is not defined from up close.30 For philosophical history, which in the end strives to seize the indispensable whole of past, present, and future, “self-conscious rationality” is nothing other than the setting for rational development, “the saint chain that crosses events past.” Tradition understood thusly gushes onward across shared material and intellectual/spiritual edifices.31 However, this totality, though in motion, proved impossible for humankind to carry.

For the doubts concerning the transfer of what has been entrusted to us and the questions of content concerning balance continue to proliferate if transience assails the reliability of the processes of cognition at the roots. The clarification of knowledge, which is to say the movements of the modern era that seek to lay its general foundations, throw into question first and foremost the original prestige of ancientness and the higher value of historical developments, in the midst of the external breaking of the old orders. The fundamental operation of reliable foundations and at the same time free self-determination will be an abstraction increasingly independent of contexts. However, at almost the same time, adherence to transformations characterized as “organic development” and the consciousness of crisis, which because of the uncertainties has come to rule, raises the value of the ideal of tradition. The counter-movement of historical Romanticism in the end undertakes the creation of tradition, expecting an artificial stability even from invented traditions.32 In the end, however, the consequentiality of dehistoricization can unveil every order of historical interconnection as mere construct.

With the reappraisal of the techniques of hermeneutics, a lastly philosophical project came into being that—reckoning with the inaccessibility of “the world as it is in itself”—seeks knowledge amidst the recent conditions of mediatedness. In accordance with the genuine interpretedness of our manner of relating to the world, the interconnections of meaning or “webs of significances” (C. Geertz) end up in the competencies of man analyzing the stock of historical tradition, and himself mirrored in it. The art of hermeneutics, which presupposes ambiguity, developed into a comprehensive interpretive culture. For Gadamer, the last stop of the search for a path in multiplicity, which could be reached by the bypass of “foreignness,” was the “fusion of horizons”: “even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and combines with the new to create a new value.”33 The culture of hermeneutics, the roots of which lie in the sacred texts of the Western world (and which became a proper way of life because of continuous and inevitable translation work), presents connection with the ever increasing rows of traditions and the bearers of tradition as unavoidable.34 The fact that even reason becomes first historical and then linguistic shows the enormous power of history over our thinking.

“Narrated” or “remembered” pasts strive ever more to compensate for the present’s loss of orientation.35 Disenchanted history in singular proliferates into histories of meaning. Identity must draw its limited substance from stories that establish a future, at the risk of untranslatability and un-interpretibility. Both anxiety and foresight motivate the manner of relating to the world (which is increasingly resigned, even in despite of any engagement), which takes on the particular having-become as its own past. Time is not a constant category of human reason, but rather a form of meaning with varying rhythm and density which, against the background of intended and unintended events, is formed by common interpretations.36

For the memory paradigm of coherence, the adequate manner of relating to the past is a continuous reconstruction of the interconnections of meaning of events bearing on us. According to the memory sociology of Maurice Halbwachs, which became something of a project paradigm itself, this task, which is indispensible from the perspective of the present, was always guided by the prevailing demands of groups. Time, born as social reality, is organized by the present, commonly lived and inhabited by the members of the group: thus everything falls out from it that, lacking meaning, does not settle within the actual referential frameworks of group life. The force of memory derives not from the past, but from the need for belonging. The place won in the community of memory, which is born as a community rooted in common sentiments and dispositions, ensures everyone who belongs to it spatial substance and temporal content.37

Jan Assmann regards the past that is embedded in face to face contact, i.e. the vistas of communication that can be seen for three generations, as the broadest possible accessible situation of “culture.”38 The present of cultural memory can relate not only to the recent past of which account is held in immediate social interaction, but also to the “groundwater-deep”39 past that is preserved (or, even on the contrary, not preserved!) in memory.40 With the passing of the participants in conversations about things lived as experiences, the process of the condensation of meaning begins, a process that never comes to a close: “there is no such thing as original memory.”41 “Objective” culture, which has been placed in formed configurations (in other words, culture that has been objectified and institutionalized, the historicized successor to the “objective spirit” of philosophical history), is not an unambiguous message, but rather an intricately manifold world of symbols. The ever changing horizon of meaning of a given life (acts and experiences) comes into new connections again and again with past events in order to nourish the present with (his)stories of origins, i.e. history made into myth by memory. Acts and experiences take place within the frameworks of the historical world of meaning, which are always in motion.

The memory of the most ancient groups, preserved in rituals and linguistic formula, connected experiences to the foundational mythical ancient time with little more than a few mediatory chain links, thus creating and maintaing their ties and engagements.42 Festive gatherings lend the significant cadence, which is significant because it always returns as common experience. Writing lends true depth to time, which thus passes less and less in the spirit of the eternal and unchangeable repetition of everything. In contrast with the bards, who are interested in memory literally repeated, the faith of the literate man insists not on the unerrability of what is recited, but rather on some kind of meaning in what is written. Instead of volatile words, re-readable writings contain the treasure chest of meaning, which for groups comprised of individuals is opening to be ever more broad: the contents that can be revived, i.e. that are hoped to be alive. The administrative tool of writing, which in all likelihood was created for everyday storage, becomes a tool for orientation in the cosmic world, which is identified with its own world. In other words, it becomes the setting for culture, understood as cultural memory. This is how writing dons the sanctity of a solemnity that goes beyond the everyday.

Regarding the new manner of relating to time, the fact that writing can be resumed, continued, or forgotten and lost of course induces change, and makes us more sensitive to change. In the emerging written culture, a veritable stream of texts begins to flow in the ceaseless rewriting, writing anew, and continued writing towards inundation. While the ever growing distance of what has been recorded makes it possible to step out of the direct bonds, it also sanctifies unmoveable and inviolable canons. In other words, it designates obligatory points of reference for every cultural practice, which then, driven in part by the fear of the passing of the community of its origins, are taken in hand by the activity centered on the cultivation of meaning, which is tailored to the exigencies of the changing present. The sharpness of the borders drawn in the world of the mentality depends mostly on the intensity of the external or internal threats to the culture perceived as one’s “own” and the experiences of rupture. Actual conflicts and sharper differentiations can be projected on each other with increasing intensity. And if history begins to become temporal, the counter-realities that are excluded with counter-concepts can be characterized as belonging exclusively to the past, which from time to time degenerates into their expulsion from the present.43

In the end, however, it is not the “spirit of writing” that decides our relationship to events. Slowing the pace of change and maintaining momentum are both cultural accomplishments. One of the functions of the Egyptian list of kings was to show that over the course of the millennia that had passed since the end of the era of the gods nothing worthwhile had happened. The need for power to rest on descent or inheritance could find a strong buttress in the notes of the initiated specialists of memory, notes which were intended either to give an impression of timelessness or to serve forgetfulness. In contrast, individualities and particularities that were considered significant gave impetus to the institutionalization of movement: this intellectual attitude, which served essentially as the foundation for historical consciousness, can be tied most adequately to expectations and hopes of oppressed situations.

The newest form of a genuine relationship between memory and identity is the attempts to draw ourselves from historical time: immersion into ourselves is also immersion into histories. Our culture has thus widely become a culture of memory, in which the self-image of the people and collectives remembering is formed by the events that have taken place involving them and the narratives of these events. Historical memory has become the primary forum for self-assertion and self-preservation, which makes historical developments (which always demand reconstruction) internal. It is not simply that “we are what we remember,” but rather, according to the consequentiality of the idea of historicity, because of the fundamentally temporal nature of our being, we strive to acquire knowledge of ourselves first and foremost by narrating histories. In the orderly system of narratives, we assure ourselves again and again of “our own roots and goals, truths and dreams.”44

Historical memory borne in communities of meaning is thus called on to mediate between “facts” and “reconstructions”: to create, through rereading, the order of common experiences. Giving up on grand narratives, it strives to look both forwards and backwards in histories that can be narrated, driven by the compulsion for ever-changing re-narration. Today, historical scholarship is also taking part in the debates concerning the work of memory, with greater sensitivity to ruptures instead of continuity and plurality instead of unity. This distinctive positive reassessment of history is tied to precursors from cultural Protesantism. Christianity understood as cultural history seeks to convince itself of its own absoluteness in the face of the relativizing force of history: we should become that which the fertile forces of the West enable us to be.45

However, according to Assmann’s exemplary case study, the more distant socio-cultural precursors of our preeminent culture of memory are to be sought in the biblical narrative: the primal model and foundational story for our historically based culture of memory is the story of the exodus from Egypt.46 For Israel, the meaningful form of time is determined by the significance-rich stories of the wanderings with God. The anthropological-cultural factor of memory here is filled with significant contents not by the closedness of a cosmic order, but rather by a process guided by the divine. The compactness of culture, in which power and salvation, truth and righteousness come together in a unity that in principle cannot be broken,47 breaks open in ancient Israel. The plethora of inscriptions recording the behavioral prescriptions in the late Egyptian temple protect the ancient Egyptian regulations of life from change, even in the midst of threats and experiences of foreignness.48 In contrast with the community that has been anchored in the cosmos and with its self-image, which in the end has become iconographically stabilized, the notion of continuity developing in created and creating time is an achievement of world-historical importance. The narrative books of the biblical redaction draw the bearings of the own essence and proper action not from some unhistorical primal time, but rather from the datable past. The commandment to remember in Deuteronomy is a paradigm of unity and belonging that is drawn from the events of this world (significant time-myths). In the soil of political vicissitudes and historical traumas, in the wake of the unraveling of the framework-precepts of the old order of meaning, they recall the memory of a covenant that was reached with a divine party but which in the meantime has been forgotten.49 God remains faithful to the people led out of the counter-world of Egypt and keeps his promise to its descendants. According to the account, which is of dubious historical credibility, the book of the covenant, which unexpectedly rises from oblivion, prompts the shaken king Josiah to return to Yahweh. The powerful stories of sinfulness and liberation become symbolic figures of memory, which originally were born by a kingdom striving to assert legitimacy and a small monotheistic religious movement. In opposition to the terror of forgetting, it becomes necessary to develop a technology of memory that chisels into the heart.50 The history is made theology by the counter-stories of figures of commemoration of liberation. The event of the covenant between God and his people demands ceaseless “chiseling into the heart, confirmation, and teaching”:51 the prophets read the twists of fate as consequences of faithlessness; the everyday order of reviving memory is canonized by the continuous editorial work of the priesthood.

At the same time, Assmann performs a backtracking of the memory traces which are often beneath the surface, unconscious, or simply suppressed, by ascribing them to the primary differentiations of our own culture. Thus, light is also cast on their unfortunate consequences, consequences which intellectual attempts were made again and again to interrupt, for instance by appealing to a counter-history. The very influential counter-memory of the cosmo-theist unity set in opposition to the monotheist unity, the figure of the “Egyptian Moses,” always reemerges from memory,52 which then seeks a broader Ecumene than the Mosaic distinction between true and false religion. The outlines of the structural intolerance lurking in monotheism’s demand for exclusiveness emerge out of the contrast of a counter-world based on a divergent principle (compactness in the absence of differentiation), the serious precondition of which is that the conquered are willing to correspond to the dominant pantheon, organized according to similar functions.

The theoretical withdrawal from a history highly significant for us (taken backwards in time) leads to a fundamentally different world, the time structure of which presents a different model. For the order of time valid for the world that preceded and surrounded the biblical world (i.e. for the traditional consciousness of time in ancient Egypt), the present was nothing more than the past, present in the present.53 In every ruler, the predecessors continued to function in that the ruler kept both the country and the world as a whole in momentum, linking tomorrow to yesterday. The individual human life takes place with its back to the future, gazing towards the past. Gratitude felt for good deeds links it to the community, while with its acts it builds its own monument. According to morality inherent to time, the real sin is not breaking the promise concerning the future, but rather forgetting the past.54 The distance from the era of mythic ancient images does not grow smaller with the passing of time. A past, strictly understood, is only supported by an unexpected break of what was, until it was ruptured, a whole. For Egypt, the foreign rule of Assyria and Persia meant the intrusion of chaos.

With regards to the aspects of time of the cultural memory of the West, in its biblical framework, the impossibility of ever bringing retrospection to a close implies a past that is always to be understood in the plural. Myth “is renewed together with every shifting present, which wins a new tinge of meaning out of it.”55 Myth wins its uninterrupted renewal from the wealth of versions of memory and counter-memory, since in this wealth old and new, disclosed and obstructed, built and buried, canonical and apocryphal, orthodox and heterodox come into tension with one another.56 Fundamental dualities run throughout the biblical text itself: the desert in contrast with the city, Israel in contrast with Judea, the state in contrast with religion, prophets in contrast with priests, the exclusiveness of Exodus in contrast with the universality of creation. If the subversive and excluded remain part of memory (which is often beneath the surface), then the articulation of contents bursting from the unconscious and the vanishing of narrative contents into the background never come to an end. “Even that which is new can only appear in the form of the reconstructed past.”57 The alternative past, which creates a contrast with the present, creates non-synchronicity, in which the primary present can be turned out of its corners with “saving” counter-stories.58

As a countermove to the overly strong demand for coherence, the work of drawing nigh and distancing is constantly underway: in the process of narrating ourselves, we present ourselves as if in a mirror in a new history again and again. Although the project of “cultural remembering” speaks about and to the person living the present together with others as it unfolds in histories, our validities are always tied to given groups and their narrations of history, which immediately throws their origins into uncertainty. Origin as some kind of “other” who can and should be addressed is always, superfluously, at our disposal, as it were. In this model, this is the legitimate place for the intrusion of novelty. In spite of the openness to the future, this future, which structures itself through memory, is not the future of the promises of progress, but rather the future of conjurings of the past. Here, the weight of presentism rests on the present concerning things past.

The paradigmatic story of Exodus, of course, is also the Western story of the shared search for freedom.59 The flight from the symbolic space of “Egypt” is the break from the bad order of servitude and the entry into the order of freedom. This revolutionary story, which is always available for retelling, is the tradition of self-liberation, the roots of which lie in tradition.

In front of finitude, commemoration pulls lines of origin towards its plans, which with regards to the handling of time is a strategy of deceleration.60 The present, which bears histories, can become overburdened at any time, of course: sometimes with the tremendous compulsion of the past, sometimes with the contingency of its handholds. As a possibility that lies outside the inner-worldly transcendence of the past, the step from the changes into a transcendent state above or beyond time remains. This is an allegedly unbounded project with an existentialist self-projection into the future, in a religious or a secular manner.

A Concluding Remark

On the basis of a still usable typology of G.W.F. Hegel concerning the writing of history in modernity, we have discussed two systematic theoretical attitudes to memory with very opposite relations to the past. The first one is centered preferably around forgetting for the sake of a functional efficacy, while the second draws on significant pasts for the sake of creative stability. Both theoretical programs are marked by a high grade of intellectual consistency and can thus serve even empirical investigations into our modern stance, as consistency, according to Max Weber, “has and always has had power over man, however limited and unstable this power is and always has been in the face of other forces of historical life”.61

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